Print N Play "Don't Wake Mommy" Playtest

Friday night I had the interesting opportunity to see my classmate Alisa, and a freshman student enjoy my print n play game of "Don't Wake Mommy". It was fun, it definitely had a lot of sabotage, a lot of deceit and of course laughter.  Along the way however I observed them and together we uncovered a few tiny issues.

First of all, I needed to get more interesting things to happen in the red and blue cards. There were 4 of  each card, which lead to a lot of repetition. It was only a matter of the crunch time, and that was an obvious and easy fix. Also another thing that was a peculiar issue was the color palette of the character markers. Now and then we would confuse each others markers simply because of how washed and similar they were. I chose to saturate the colors on the character cards and markers so that this was no longer a problem. Another issue was the abundance of red tiles vs blue tiles, and not being able to reach the end goal of 30 candies. My solution to this was reducing the amount of red tiles, and also adding more candy winnings on the blue cards vs the spankings or candy loss on the red cards. Those were the biggest issues, there was also a matter on how tricky it was to collect the candy because of how they were simply cut pieces rather than having an outline. I also took the liberty of making  one of the playable characters more interesting to play as.

Update: There was another flaw in my game's layout that was not brought up until I spoke with my teacher and played the game with him. My game does not have any skill, it is mostly based on chance. To remedy this I changed the mechanic of the red and blue cards. You can hold blue cards and use them against your players, and red cards do not punish you until there is a card where you have woken up mommy.