Playtesting

Does anyone like playtesting? I love playing, I'm pretty lukewarm on playtesting. When I worked at Wizards I was always amazed at the people who would give their left (something) to playtest when I simply hated the process. Of course, CCG's are probably the least fun thing to playtest in the universe. Clout is more fun to playtest than the average game. It's still not my favorite thing to do. Writing this, for example, is more fun to me.

Right now we've got two things in playtesting. First we have the new game. That's pretty well underway. Paul's really good at getting the game into a fully playable state before we begin, which makes life easy on me. We make nice printouts of the chips on stock round stickers (no art, but better than the chicken scratchines we were using!) and play until we've made so many changes it doesn't make sense to play any longer each day. The schedule's so tight we may not have time for external playtesting, which seems really bad, but I'm certain will be fine. The game is still Clout, and still a base set, so we're not too far off the beaten path. The new abilities are what really need testing and those we can handle.

While we're doing all this work on the new game, the CLINCH promo chips also need playtesting. Time's just as tight with these and I'm contacting a few forum regulars and existing playtesters to see if they'll have time to give the new chips a look-over. I'm sure they're fine, but until you play with them, you never know. I've already chosen who I'm going to ask, but if you're really interested, you can go ahead and ask to playtest. I'm looking for:

Players who play more than once per week, with groups of 4 or more. I'll need all members of the group to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) before I can send any files or materials. Players who are prolific on the message boards will certainly have a leg-up.

Requesting at this point probably won't get you in on this round of playtesting, but it may well get your foot in the door for whatever we do next.