Playtesting Best Practices

Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online covers the complete journey of playtesting – the iterative journey to shape and refine tabletop games from raw ideas to balanced and fun games. This step-by-step guide embraces the process and celebrates the purpose of every step, from early self-playtesting to late-stage unguided playtesting, and offers the specific questions and practices the author has refined to perfect his own games.

This book is split up into four main sections, each with a distinct focus:

• Getting ready to playtest: Establishing goalposts, brainstorming, self-playtesting, getting organized, how to design a prototype, and writing rules. The focus here is starting good habits and establishing best practices, whether this is your first game or your hundredth.
• Playtesting in the real world: How to find playtesters, how to teach your game, what to do during the playtest, how to take notes and collect feedback, and being a great playtester yourself.
• Playtesting online: How to adapt to digital platforms, the best practices for playtesting online, how to use these opportunities well, and cautions about playtesting online.
• What to do next: How to iterate, additional ways to playtest your game, knowing when you’re done with playtesting, and choosing how to get your game out there.

Chris Backe (rhymes with 'hockey') is an award-winning board game designer. When not designing games, he's the co-founder of No Box Games (a publisher of print-and-play games), and the co-founder of Virtual Playtesting (an online playtesting community). He's written about board game design since 2017 and has playtested hundreds of games in over a dozen countries. He currently lives in Birmingham, England with his wife, Laura.