Playing With Snakes

Thursday night was the highlight of the week for many in our game group. We would put the kids to bed, grab some snacks, and head out for three hours of laughing and gaming. So the idea of interrupting that with, “would you like to play this very roughly thought out, incredibly low fidelity game design” was a little daunting. However, I worked up the courage to ask the guys and, unsurprisingly, they said yes.

“How long will it take to play?”

This was the first question that they had for me about my game and honestly, I didn’t have an answer. This would be the first time that I would actually be playing the game. I had no idea how long it would take. But, “I dunno” is not a fantastic answer, and so I settled on a time limit. We would play the game for 30 minutes, I’d glean what I could and we’d extrapolate from wherever we finished to try to figure out how long the game would actually take to play.

I was a little concerned about “the party”. Like most game groups, we have a unique collection of players. One likes heavy euro games with complex strategies that you can study and master, another likes chaos and fast-paced fun, one likes heavy math games, another loves rolling dice, one likes a cooperative or coopetitive game, and so on. You can’t please everyone all the time and I was specifically worried about the players that were more interested in long, heavy, strategic games. I was worried they would find the chaos too random. I was wrong.

At the 30 minute mark, I stopped us and suggested that I had received a lot of great insights from them and we could move onto a real game. The player who built a spreadsheet to help us choose which game to play each week based on aggregate enjoyment and player count asked if we could keep playing and 15 minutes later we had our first winner of snakes and ladders and horseshoes and hand-grenades.

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