How to playtest a board game at every stage of development - six approaches and when to use them.

How to Playtest Your Board Game Alone And When to Stop

Solo playtesting means playing the game on your own regardless of how many players it's designed for or whether it's cooperative or competitive. You'll probably need to play multi-handed taking on the role of several players. It's the first thing I do with any new game and it serves a very specific purpose: making sure the core mechanics work before anyone else's time gets wasted.

The goal here isn't to account for every edge case. It's to verify that each step in the rules leads naturally into the next, that nothing is missing, and that nothing fundamentally breaks the game before it reaches other people. Even if the next step is playtesting with friends, it's worth doing enough solo testing first to avoid sitting down with them only to realise five minutes in that the game needs more work.

The caveat, and one I know from experience, is that it's very easy to spend too long here. I did this with Station Decimus, spending longer than I needed ironing out rules because I was nervous about getting it in front of people. With friends as my next group I could have moved on much sooner than I did. Solo playtesting also has hard limits. There's a huge amount you simply can't test alone. In cooperative games with limited communication like Containment Failure, I can play multi-handed but I can never actually forget the information the other player holds. It makes sure the mechanics work, but it can't confirm the game is fun.

How to Get People to Playtest Your Board Game And What to Ask Them

Once the core loop works mechanically the next step is getting the game in front of other people, explaining the rules yourself and being present either playing or guiding them through. This is what I call assisted playtesting and it's probably the approach you'll spend the most time on across a game's development.

One thing worth knowing upfront: you don't always need to play a full game. Sometimes just a few rounds gives you the information you need to know what to change next.

Friends and family are the natural starting point but they come with two limitations: they may not be your target market and they may be too kind with feedback. Getting diversity matters, and making sure some of your playtesters are the kind of people who would actually buy your game matters even more. For this, convention playtesting and local playtest groups like Playtest UK have been particularly valuable as they've given me access to a much wider and more diverse range of playtesters than I could have found on my own.

The most useful questions are specific ones. "Did you enjoy it?" gets you a yes or no. "Was there any moment where you weren't sure what to do next?" gets you something you can act on. Ask about specific moments, specific rules, specific decisions and not the game in general.

The main constraint with assisted playtesting is that it requires your presence. You can only ever have one game going at a time and your available time is finite. The feedback you get is high quality, but the scale is limited.

How to Playtest Your Board Game at Conventions - Making the Most of Limited Time

Convention playtesting is distinct enough from regular assisted playtesting to deserve its own section. Many board game conventions have dedicated playtesting spaces: UK Games Expo partners with Playtest UK to provide a large area specifically for this, and conventions like HandyCon have regular playtesting tables available.

The key difference is context. Convention attendees aren't there just to playtest your game, they've paid to attend and will often have more things to do than time to do it which should change how you approach the session.

When I do convention playtesting I reduce the game to the shortest part I can still get meaningful feedback from. For Station Decimus that means one mission instead of four. I'm not going to ask someone to spend an hour on a game when after one round the feedback might already be telling me something fundamental needs to change. Respecting playtesters' time at a convention is essential.

Three hours at UKGE has taught me more than weeks of solo playtesting or multiple sessions at local groups. The diversity of audience is significantly better as you're reaching people from across the country rather than whoever attends your local group. The geographic range alone changes the quality of feedback you get.

I've written a separate article on how to get the most from convention playtesting if you want more detail on this.

How to Blind Playtest Your Board Game Rulebook And What Watching Players Teaches You

In-person blind playtesting means handing over the game and written rules and letting players figure it out themselves while you watch. Unless things go horribly wrong you say nothing. You don't explain anything or answer questions. You just observe.

This is best done later in development, once your rules are more concrete and have had time to be refined through assisted playtesting. What you're testing here is different from anything you've tested before. You're not asking whether the game is fun, you're asking whether someone can pick up your rulebook and actually play the game you designed.

The single most valuable tip I can give for in-person blind playtesting is to watch more than you listen. Players will do things you hadn't expected and things you didn't intend. If they're regularly consulting the rulebook or cheat sheets mid-game it suggests certain rules, however clearly written, aren't intuitive. You pick up things through observation that you'd never get from asking for feedback directly.

This is particularly hard to replicate any other way. Having written the rules yourself you read your own rulebook through the lens of knowing the game inside out. Watching someone interpret it with no prior knowledge of it is a completely different experience and one that has identified several specific changes I needed to make to the Station Decimus rulebook around layout and how easy it is to parse certain sections mid-game.

I've written a separate article and video on blind playtesting with more tips on how to prepare for it.

How to Playtest Your Board Game Online - Tabletop Simulator, Board Game Arena and Beyond

Online playtesting through platforms like Tabletop Simulator or Board Game Arena is the method I have the least personal experience with, but it opens up reach that no in-person method can match.

There are two versions of this. Assisted online playtesting where you're present in the session to guide people through, and fully remote digital blind playtesting where you send the files and let people play entirely on their own. Both are valuable but both come with a shared caveat and either way you should get your rules reasonably solid first.

Setting up a digital version of your game takes real effort. If the core gameplay loop changes after you've done that work you'll have to rebuild it. Don't invest in digital setup while the game is still in significant flux.

Feedback from online playtesting is more variable than in-person methods. When you're present in the session you can get good information. When you're not, it's much harder to extract meaningful feedback as communication is simply more difficult remotely, through no fault of the playtesters.

One practical note: if you're considering pitching to publishers, having a digital version ready can be genuinely useful. After my UKGE pitching sessions one publisher asked if they could play the game remotely. Being able to send Tabletop Simulator files immediately was the difference between that conversation continuing or stalling. A playtester who played at UKGE also connected me with a friend who wanted to try the game but couldn't attend the expo. I sent the digital files, they played it, enjoyed it, and offered to playtest future versions remotely. That kind of ongoing remote playtester relationship is hard to build through any other method.