Balance Testing & Social Proofing A Game On BGA Before Print

[oryan5000]

Hello everyone,

I have designed and play tested a board game and am trying to decide between two separate approaches:

• Start by developing a digital implementation of the game on BGA. This would allow me to see if anonymous people actually enjoy the game. Then, if people are actually playing the game, I can see if some obvious meta forms where certain cards/board spaces/mechanics are too over-powered that I missed in playtesting. Then, once I have ensured that their is real interest from others in the game, and I have balanced over-powered mechanics/cards/etc, publish the game to print.

• Print the game, and then try to sell it whether through a Kickstarter/Gamefound/self-publish/publisher etc, and only after publishing in print (through a self-publish method), implement on BGA to try to drive interest in the game to try to drive print sales.

It seems to me that the second option where the game starts in print is far more common. But from my perspective, it seems that starting digital would make more sense in that you could catch obvious imbalances you missed while playtesting. It also avoids the nightmare of spending a ton of money to print a game that turns out no one wanted and now you have 1,000+ copies sitting in your garage.

Am I missing anything obvious here? Is there an obvious reason why you wouldn't go the digital implementation route first?

[IndianaScones]

One thing to consider is that BGA will not allow a digital implementation of a game that can't be purchased in physical form.

[oryan5000]

Than you for letting me know that. This definitely changes the plan and makes the first option not viable. Unless I made some print on demand version on the Gamecrafter until I was ready to make version 2 printed in bulk. Would having a print on demand version on the Gamecrafter satisfy that requirement?

[Fearinn]

I think it would, but I definitely encourage you to open a support ticket to confirm that.

[RicardoRix]

This idea has come up before, and there is no official BGA stance to look up.

Lots of people would be interested in the answer.

[oryan5000]

I see this note here:

So you definitely can develop your prototype/unpublished game on BGA, but we encourage you to think twice about it and do it only if you are in one/several of the situations below:

the game is going to be published in the near future
the game design process is really 100% done: the game is ready to be published in its current shape (ex: self-publishing game, game in a crowdfunding process...)
you want to test your game with a big number of players to fine-tune some minor things ("balance" of the game).

But then it also says this:

Note : Games that can not be bought will not be published at BGA. It will not go further than private alpha, so you'll only be able to play with your friends.


Source: https://boardgamearena.com/doc/BGA_Game_licenses?

So who's discretion is it to say whether your game has been properly balanced enough? It seems to say you can have an unpublished game on BGA and do some final "balance" tweaks and then publish. But then immediatly after is a note that says a game that can't be bought will not be published at BGA.

[Fearinn]

The final note was added recently, the rest of the text is older. As Ricardo said, they didn't make it clear to us devs either. That's why you should ask the support directly.

[jordijansen]

Just to provide some real-life experience:
We've done balance testing of the prototype for Tag Team (will soon be releasing in retail and go to Public ALPHA). BGA is not very flexible when it comes to its coding and is very "static" in that sense. This is nice for the players and works well for "finished" games as all the rules are enforced by the system and not by the players. This also means that changes that might seem like small changes to the game designer or publisher, can have large consequences for the code base. This makes each change very expensive and time-sensitive to implement.

We're again going through this for the eventual expansions of Tag Team, but I've been cured of implementing prototypes on BGA for this matter. I now only to take on finished games and not games that are subject to changes because its unpredictable.

There is a reason most publishers use other platforms for prototype testing since it's much more flexible for this purpose. (I'm not mentioning said platform as I think that is against the rules.