Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online

by Chris Backe

Overview

Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online covers the complete journey of playtesting – the iterative journey to shape and refine tabletop games from raw ideas to balanced and fun games. This step-by-step guide embraces the process and celebrates the purpose of every step, from early self-playtesting to late-stage unguided playtesting, and offers the specific questions and practices the author has refined to perfect his own games.

This book is split up into four main sections, each with a distinct focus:

• Getting ready to playtest: Establishing goalposts, brainstorming, self-playtesting, getting organized, how to design a prototype, and writing rules. The focus here is starting good habits and establishing best practices, whether this is your first game or your hundredth.
• Playtesting in the real world: How to find playtesters, how to teach your game, what to do during the playtest, how to take notes and collect feedback, and being a great playtester yourself.
• Playtesting online: How to adapt to digital platforms, the best practices for playtesting online, how to use these opportunities well, and cautions about playtesting online.
• What to do next: How to iterate, additional ways to playtest your game, knowing when you’re done with playtesting, and choosing how to get your game out there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040364765
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	06/09/2025
Series:	CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	164
File size:	794 KB

About the Author

Chris Backe (rhymes with 'hockey') is an award-winning board game designer. When not designing games, he's the co-founder of No Box Games (a publisher of print-and-play games), and the co-founder of Virtual Playtesting (an online playtesting community). He's written about board game design since 2017 and has playtested hundreds of games in over a dozen countries. He currently lives in Birmingham, England with his wife, Laura.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Section 1 - Getting Ready to Playtest, Chapter 1 - how we got here - a review to catch you up, Chapter 2 - Brainstorming, Self-playtesting, and Organizing, Chapter 3 - Prototyping the Game, Chapter 4 - writing rules and reference cards, Section 2 - Playtesting in the Real World, Chapter 5 - finding playtesters and preparing to playtest with other people, Chapter 6 - teaching your game to playtesters, Chapter 7 - during the playtest, Chapter 8 - taking notes and collecting feedback, Chapter 9 - iterating and preparing for the next playtest, Chapter 10 - becoming a great playtester, Section 3 - Playtesting Online, Chapter 11 - getting started with online playtesting, Chapter 12 - best practices with online playtesting, Section 4 - What to Do Next, Chapter 13 - Stress-testing your game - additional ways to playtest, Chapter 14 - what happens next?, Conclusion