Travelling Salesmen major iteration

I'm alone... ¡Wich is good!  At least regarding my tabletop's design process.

Since a couple of days back, my 3 YO daughter is at my inlaws, almost not seen them for pandemic related reasons; for the same kind of reasons, my wife has to attend a series of long-hour shifts.

I reviewed part of my game design teaching material when I stumble upon one of the Travelling Salesmen prototypes that I had left mid-construction over a year ago. So I thought, "well, I could finish it before pack-it back," after a little more of half an hour (¡Heck, it takes longer to cut cardboard hex!), my chore was complete. But if you are a game designer, you know well that a recently finished prototype can't be kept untested.

I hadn't other plans, so I decided to give the gizmo a test run. Over the years, I have learned that testing alone a tabletop game for several players could take two forms, which I have called:

• Systems and Mechanisms run, where you try the sequence of actions and repeat them to see if they are complex enough, to avoid unnecessary process and recurrent loops that prevent the closing condition.
• Playstyle run, where you try to "put in the players' shoes" to anticipate how they will react to the game experience, to ensure their engagement during the play session.

Over the years, I have done more than enough of the first type of test-runs, so I choose to do the second one. One key factor in doing a useful Playstyle run test is defining gameplan for each simulated player, avoiding using the same strategy repeatedly, since experience has shown me that to use "cloned players" tend to hide our game's weakness model.

Before continuing, let's do a quick recap of what Travelling Salesmen is about. In this game, 3 players compete to reach every post on the map, called Cities, with the 2 pawns under its control. The player will move their pawns over paths to reach the different Cities, called Roads; this movement consumes Movent Points. The Cities and Roads are represented by tiles making the game's map is modular, changing every session.

OK, let's go back to our story. I decide to use the following gameplans for each simulated player: 

• The first player (yellow) will prefer to use one pawn over the other, so the second pawn will usually move if there is any remaining Movement Point.
• The second player (green) will try to block other players at every available opportunity. To maximize this strategy will keep its pawns far away from each other.
• The third player (blue) will try to enter a City with both of its pawns simultaneously and only left one behind if it blocks another's player's next turn.

I left the first session uncompleted after 45 minutes due to major confusion; my cognitive overload was high. Even with the Tracking Boards added for the first time on this iteration, I forgot which City was going from turn to turn. Not only that, setting up the map at the beginning of the match took too long, and Citied had too many Roads connecting them. What I did to tackle each of these problems was:

• To use less granularity on the Roads Movent Values, reducing them from 4 (7, 11, 13,17) to 3 (8, 12, 14) and eliminating Movement Points consumption at entering a City. These changes increase the enter a City Tile every turn, minimizing the chances of both the player's pawn end a turn on a Road, which led to a more streamlined Movement Tracking Board.
• Reduce the number of Road Tiles that each player gets at the Setting Up Phase, from 12 to 6. This change led to less interconnectivity between Cities and allowed me to reduce the total number of Road Tiles from 42 to 24 (¡Let's talk about reduction!).

After I made the changes, I completed 3 sessions (43, 56, and 39 minutes long, respectively). With these happy results, I take my game's sequence bullet points and notes and translate them to the first version of a rules sheet; then, I made a new Illustrator file with the necessary modifications and exported it to a PDF. Finally, I took both files and merged them into a single PNP version to share it.

One last thing I wanted to comment on, part of my cognitive overload on the first test run was due to poor prototyping. The City Tiles were marked with letters from A to I, while the Tracking Board use names such as "New York" and "Los Angeles", making me double-check the equivalence on entering at every City. On the same page, I intend to replace the pawns with Stand-up Player Pieces with different names, such as Jhon and Mary; this way, players' task of telling apart each of its units will be easier.