Nine to Five – Playtesting

This post will be discussing the board game I have chosen to develop for the subject, Game Experience Design, Nine to Five. Nine to Five takes place in an office setting and follows each player throughout their day as busy nine to five office employees. The aim of this game is to reach 5pm and clock off before any of your co-workers, you’d better get started before you’re late to work!

When it comes to designing the game itself, I decided to develop a board game which consisted of an office floor layout with a game path weaving around the board. The game’s colour scheme makes use of several muted yet distinguishable tones, in order to mimic the drab daily cycle of a 9 to 5 office job. I curated the board game first through some sketches, working out the basic route I wanted the path to take across the board, then after establishing that, I moved into Illustrator to develop the actual game board itself, along with the playing cards. As the setting of this game takes place in an office setting, the action cards for this game are called “late penalty” and “early mark” once again to mimic the setting of an office job.

In order to curate an entertaining and functional game, I chose to look further into the phycology behind game genres and why people are more inclined to play certain genres more than others. Whilst conducting some of my research, I came across Stewart Woods’ Eurogames: The Design, Culture and Play of Modern European Board Games, which includes Danish game designer, Jesper Juul’s personal experience of being a gamer, introducing the idea that “the simple feeling of a pull, of looking at a game and wanting to play it,” whilst also noting that “the games pull is a subjective experience” which can be altered dependent on the type of game the audience has played, their personal taste and whether your audience is willing to give the game the time it requires to play through. As seen throughout this discussion, it can be confirmed that previous game experiences alter a player’s preference towards the type of game they play and tend to lean towards playing. Therefore, it is quite important to follow the trends of popular games around at the time.

After conducting some further research around board games and what genres gained a larger audience and so forth, I narrowed down my concept for the game Nine to Five, Nine to Five is a fairly standard, yet popular genre of roll and move, race/card game, set in an office building. The journey of building this game began by sketching out a path for my game board, once finalised I moved on to build the board in Adobe Illustrator, using muted hues of purple, green and beige, to represent the dreary daily grind of a 9-5 office job. After completing the mock-up version of my board, I began curating action cards, which would alter the player’s path based on the positive or negative outcome they received from the action card.

Once I had designed the board and enough cards to play a small run-through of the game, I printed and cut them all to size and gathered some friends to begin playtesting. I was able to test the playability of this game with a few friends and some of the example cards I had made up. I printed 6 of both the penalty and reward cards, in order to experience how to game would function with the addition of action cards. After cutting out the cards and taping the board together, I borrowed a dice and some player pieces from another board game I have and began playing.

Whilst playtesting I became aware of some issues that I hadn’t considered before the playtest, such things being:

• With the board that I had curated, I had chosen to make two shortcut paths for players to follow, as an opportunity to get the upper hand over their competitors. Although the path was shorter, it came with consequences, as half of the shorter path’s tiles consisted of ‘late penalty’ squares, to which the player may have to retreat back down the board and lose the upper hand they were trying to achieve. Now, although I had considered the negative repercussions, I hadn’t considered the positive, I didn’t make any additional ‘early mark’ or freeroll squares to entice the player to tempt the longer route, therefore making it somewhat a useless feature.
• Secondly, I found that I needed to curate more action squares throughout the board, as there were some moments during gameplay that became slightly dull due to the lack of risk/reward factor or even unknown action ahead. Therefore, I plan to add more action squares as this feature was the most entertaining during play.
• Lastly, I received feedback regarding the action cards, more importantly, the double-action cards; some action cards required the player to roll again to determine their fate, I was initially worried this would add too much time to the game, dragging it out and making it less enjoyable, however playtesting seemed to prove otherwise, as feedback concluded that these double-action cards were, in fact, a highly enjoyable factor of the game.