This weekend, I traveled to Lansing MI with Matt for Protospiel, a small gathering of amateur game-designers like ourselves. I met so many cool game designers, Dominic Crappuchettes, James Kyle, Kory Heath, Mike Petty, Kes Sampanthar, Ken Stevens to name a few, and were playtesting from 9 am until 10 pm every day. It was amazing to play other people's games, and have to think about them from both a player's perspective and a designer's perspective at the same time was exhausting and exhiliarating.

A few of my games made it to the table. We had two sessions of Gene Pool, with comments of "great for high-school kids," and "I want to directly mess with my opponent." I'll need to work on balancing the actions a little more and removing some of the fiddly rules. Kes volunteered to playtest it some more, so I'll try to get another copy printed and sent off soon. And on Saturday we had one session of Ultra Violets, which is getting to a workable state. I'm working on changes to make it more tense all the way through, and have some of the cost balanced with the penatlies, but I'm happy with where it's going. It might never make it beyond me, but that's just fine.

What I enjoyed the most was the daily seminars. After lunch, there was an hour session of talking about games and design, where we learned all about how to playtest, explicit vs. implicit theme, and common problems in game design. I took notes as well as I could and tried to absorb all the info. It makes me want to play more games, maybe start a regular game nigh, since I seem to be behind in my game experiences. There's just too many games! :) I can't wait for next year's conference, hopefully I'll be free.