Good day. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead and I'm your host, Rob Zackney. Broadcasting to you today from Lake Tahoe where I've been sort of hold up with a lot of friends of the show and the Gammers with Jobs guys. And my panel today, first, our friend and freelance writer, Julian Murdoch. Hello. Welcome back to the show, sir. It's been a while. It has indeed. We have things to talk about this, so it's exciting. We have so much to talk about. And a big part of what we have to talk about is an upcoming project that we've been sort of playtesting this week from Ironwall Games designer Rob Davio. Hello. Welcome back to the show, Rob. Thanks. Good to be here.

You know, we've spent the last several days playing the hell out of your upcoming legacy

game, Seafall. And before we get into today's topic, which is really the art of playtesting,

the craft of playtesting and changing games and getting feedback and giving feedback as a tester.

Give us a quick thumbnail of what Seafall is.

Seafall is a legacy game, which means that some actions that you do in one game carry on to the next one.

It's something I did for Risk Legacy, which we talked about in an earlier episode.

Seafall is a game of exploration, basically set during the age of sail in a world like ours, but not exactly like ours.

So each player plays an empire or a nation going out and trying to achieve glory in kind of like almost a 4x game sort of way.

You can trade and explore and build up your ships and your cities, fight each other, find

islands, find what's on them.

And the idea is to sort of explore this vast ocean and build a narrative of these empires

and how they put their thumbprint on the world.

And I remember that this game has actually been in, it went into playtesting fairly recently. You sort of broadened the pool of players,

correct? I did. There is maybe a dozen groups right now that got a version. And it's a little

earlier than I wanted to send it to playtesters. And I'm going to send them an email sort of acknowledging that. But I'm giving myself a deadline of next year. So I wanted as many people as I could to find as many issues as I could. But the flip side is they're getting pretty big changes pretty regularly, which normally for a game wouldn't be a big deal. But because it's a legacy, the game, they've already, like, printed out a board and a map and, you know, explored things

and written on it, and I have to go, yeah, you got to print that all over and start again from

game one. And so I suspect pretty soon I'm going to get some dropouts from that, which I don't

mind. I fully expected, and I saw it with Risk Risk Legacy that you just get a burnout. They're like I can't I can't reset back to start and do this again. It's actually one of my biggest questions because I you know I've played this game in a couple different versions as you've been sort of making it and you always just sort of show up so I get the easy part right you just show up and you're like here's some stuff let's try this but you're now working with this playtest group. And you're playing with a game that's got like unlocks in it and things like that. It's really different than, you know, if Daniel Sola sends me a card game PDF, I can print a bunch of those out and I can play the game in an hour. And there's really low investment as a play tester and something like that.

How do you even handle things like Unlocks in a Playtest group?

Oh.

Sorry.

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