One Night Ultimate Werewolf

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One Night Ultimate Werewolf is the perfect starter game for sessions like this. The prototype is very easy to make. It can be scaled up and time managed easily by having the demonstrator act as the announcer. If you were going to run this workshop as a single session, this would be the game to pick.

Experimentation here is going to be easy because it allows participants to take a boring role (a villager) and see what happens if they put in a role of their own design. This lets people explore the social context in which the game functions, because roles in ONUW are driven by people.

Telestrations

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Telestrations works perfectly as a starter paper prototype game, largely because it started off as a kind of folk game. ‘Eat Poop You Cat’ is a game of writing something weird and folding it over. The next person looks at the previous fold and draws what was written. They then fold it over and pass it to the next person that guesses, and so on. Telestrations works great in these kind of scenarios as a warm-up – I wouldn’t necessarily use this and One Night Ultimate Werewolf to begin a course like this, but I’d definitely use one of them. They both also scale up to large groups, because you can handle it by number of rounds as opposed to number of players.

One thing I would say though is that you do have to be careful – all it takes is one person that decides to draw or write something inappropriate and it’ll spread around the room like a toxin.

Skull

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Skull, like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, is an excellent starter game for sessions like this. However, it does have one additional element that will be relevant in the development of low-fidelity prototypes – preventing information leakage. Writing skulls and roses on paper will almost certainly permit people to see through the thin material, and so part of the refinement process of the prototype will be to deal with this.

Solutions include folding paper over, colouring in the back of each ‘card’, or using alternate components such as playing cards. However, participants may find that these have side-effects that impact on information leakage. For example, the distinct pattern of pen-strokes used to colour in the back of a card might be identifying. Fold size might be identifying. If you have blank cards available, I’d recommend getting participants to play through with paper first to illustrate a key consideration of paper prototyping – low fidelity doesn’t mean no fidelity.

Skull is also likely to be useful in exploring the limits of paper prototyping. Giving players special cards with unique powers is unlikely to result in a better game but it’s valuable for people to consider why their changes seemed like a good idea but didn’t work in practice.

Love Letter

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Paper Prototype Kit

Love Letter is an ideal prototyping game because it has very few moving parts but all those parts are amenable to experimentation. The roles in One Night Ultimate Werewolf are social constructs that people need to inhabit. Love Letter’s different cards are all more nakedly mechanistic and allow experimentation with the game rather than with people. As such, the card powers with whichparticipants might experiment are going to have a significant impact on the balance of the game, and can show the nuance of analysis needed during exercises of this type.

The Resistance

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One thing that the Resistance shows prominently is the importance of social context in evaluation. Just because a prototype works and works well, it doesn’t mean you’ll get a fully representative experience. Group mix makes a difference. You might play the Resistance with one group and have no fun, and find it’s the best thing ever with the next group. For The Resistance as an exercise, it’s worth taking a bit of time to discuss differences in individual perspective throughout.

Not everyone will find it fun and it’s deceptive to trust how ‘the table’ feels about a game versus how individuals at that table feel.

Billionaire Banshee

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The base game of this is not suitable for children, although a paper prototype can be as age-appropriate as you like.

Billionaire Banshee is a game that might not be appropriate for all audiences, although you can certainly easily frame it in ways where it would be. It’s a game about discussing with people whether or not they’’d date a fictional person with a specific perk and a specific quirk. ‘They are the world’s greatest cook, but they used to work on death row and liked it’. That sort of thing. However, this an occasionally transgressive activity and thus it teaches two important specific lessons:

1. How a prototype is pitched is as important as what the prototype is
2. Consent and comfort of testers is vital, and you should be on the look out for things that are making people uncomfortable.

Billionaire Banshee can easily be recast. ‘Would you give this person a job?’, ‘Would you be friends with this person?’, ‘What do you imagine this person’s history would be?’, ‘roleplay out how you would woo this person’ . Prototypes here don’t necessarily explore changing the game, but changing its presentation.

Spyfall

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Spyfall has a problem when you try to play it as a paper prototype. It’s not that it needs lots of content, but rather it has lots of repetition in its content. For each location you add to the game, you need to repeat the location cards to match player count. It’s a game that is technically perfect for paper prototyping, but effectively a chore.

When the prototype is put together, the game works just as well as it does in the published version. What you will likely find here though, and participants in the session should consider, is the reluctance they have to destroy components or make changes to the design. The more effort people put into their prototypes, the more they’ll kick against the idea of getting rid of bits of it. That means that for some games, paper prototyping is unlikely to be a good technique for rapidly or widely exploring the solution space of an idea because the inertia on change is too high.

Codenames

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Codenames looks like it should be perfect for paper prototyping – it’s just words on cards, with a grid overlay. However, it almost certainly won’t work because Codenames requires enough content to make everything function. Shifting around the same twenty-five cards is going to converge the table towards the same repeated talking points and what fun there is in the design itself will not materialise.

Codenames works, in part, because it comes with a massive pile of words and a large number of solution grids. This makes sure that the space of the discussion remains functionally infinite. The more time you need to spend on the circumstances of making a paper prototype, the less appropriate a tool it is likely to be. The less effort you spend on the prototype itself, the more time you can spend exploring the ideas it represents.

Funemployed

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Paper prototype kit

The base game of this is not suitable for children, although a paper prototype can be as age-appropriate as you like. It’s also possible to curate the standard cards in the main box to ensure there are no obviously risque elements.

Funemployed is the game you’d use to follow up Codenames to show an alternate approach to this issue. Codenames requires new content in blocks of twenty-five, because otherwise the change between one session and another is minimal. Those twenty-five are also contextually linked in tightly coupled ways – you need to have some ability for players to determine meaningful connections between them. The choice of words has to take that into account.

Funemployed though has loosely coupled content, and the fun comes from trying to build a coherent argument from incoherent elements. This means it’s much easier to do this incrementally, and also in parallel with playing through the prototype.

Consider an old fashioned game of Charades where people would write down words and put them in a bowl. Funemployed can work this exact same way with people adding in new jobs and new resume talking points when they have a good idea or when it feels like some novelty is required. Fundamentally there’s no real difference in architecture in the prototypes of these two different games, but one works and the other doesn’t. At least, not easily.

It’s the looseness of how the game elements are coupled that makes one ideal fodder and the other one a difficult sell.

Tiny Epic Galaxies

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Prototype Kit

I’d only recommend this if you have blank dice available.

There is a very comprehensive paper prototyping kit that you can get for Tiny Epic Galaxies. It has everything someone would need. They just need to construct it. However, the lookup table that is used to convert standard d6 dice rolls into Tiny Epic Galaxies specific iconography means that the cognitive cost of playing the paper prototype is extraordinary. Almost everyone will come away from this game thinking it’s rubbish because it was too difficult to play. The experimentation that you do here is that you give participants blank dice and let them draw the iconography onto the faces.

Try again with the right components, and the difficulty plummets. It becomes very enjoyable. The lesson here is that just because a testing session fails, it doesn’t mean there’s anything necessarily wrong with the design.

Sometimes the problem is with the very fidelity of the prototype, and you need to investigate whether that’s the case before deciding something doesn’t work. Otherwise you’ll throw away perfectly good solutions.