Bez on Nostr: Sometimes games are just broken. Sometimes publishers make mistakes. How can we make ...
Sometimes games are just broken. Sometimes publishers make mistakes. How can we make things right?
I played a social deduction game today that was a bit shit.
With 6 players, it seemed like the 'good' team had a surprising amount of info, and if that was shared, the bad team couldn't do anything to win. And unlike some games, there's no meaningful potential repercussions for revealing info.
We played twice and I gave the instructions to a friend to confirm we hadn't made any mistakes.
I looked on BGG and found that a couple years ago, someone had asked if the game was broken (i.e. only one team has any chance to win) and the designer apologised, confirming that this was true and that they sadly didn't realise this in testing.
Whilst it's easy for me to be smug that we realised the issue (arguably making us better developers than the publisher used) this is something that could easily happen to anyone. Releasing a game that turns out to have a critical flaw.
So if that were to happen, what's a reasonable way to solve it?
This publisher offered 3 ideas for solving the issue, but a year later confirmed that they hadn't tested any of them (focusing on newer projects) and offered a refund in response to someone who felt hard done by.
I played a social deduction game today that was a bit shit.
With 6 players, it seemed like the 'good' team had a surprising amount of info, and if that was shared, the bad team couldn't do anything to win. And unlike some games, there's no meaningful potential repercussions for revealing info.
We played twice and I gave the instructions to a friend to confirm we hadn't made any mistakes.
I looked on BGG and found that a couple years ago, someone had asked if the game was broken (i.e. only one team has any chance to win) and the designer apologised, confirming that this was true and that they sadly didn't realise this in testing.
Whilst it's easy for me to be smug that we realised the issue (arguably making us better developers than the publisher used) this is something that could easily happen to anyone. Releasing a game that turns out to have a critical flaw.
So if that were to happen, what's a reasonable way to solve it?
This publisher offered 3 ideas for solving the issue, but a year later confirmed that they hadn't tested any of them (focusing on newer projects) and offered a refund in response to someone who felt hard done by.