Repertoire First Playtest (or Procrastination)

Well, after much delay I’m finally getting these notes down. And I’ll admit I’ve learned something significant here: write up playtest notes immediately. Stale notes aren’t as worthy.

First of all: hey, this game actually works! Fie on harsh Game Chef critics! Kudos and congratulations to the incredibly awesome games which did win and their brilliant designers. Repertoire is not their peer. Yet.

Anyhow, the catty backstage sniping of a troupe of actors boiled out of the game without any coaxing. Honestly, at the beginning of the session, I’d forgotten that particular part of the design, absorbed instead in trying to translate mechanics and text into an actual game.

The biggest problem was certainly that the producer either needs more to do or not be a player role. It’s easy enough for a player to pick up the producer’s end of an endgame argument. Any responsibilities that the producer took on would diminish the power of the actors, a lot, so for the time being I think the producer is going to become the face of the game-as-challenge.

And generally, the mechanics are about half-baked. The token currency is little too complicated, and there’s significant weakness in how scenes resolve. On the one hand, as it stands, it’s easy for everyone to lose, so the the producer’s rancor increases rapidly. And it’s not clear why you would want to bid against another player; on the other hand the bidding against was a significant contributor to the cattiness.

There are few places where the rules are really soft. There ought to be some control over who can be in a scene—one idea that got suggested was that the number of dice and actors in a scene have to be different which is interesting enough to playtest. On a related note, there needs to be a clear rule about how and when a scene gets called – possibly the framer of the scene calls it when he wants to.

Cards should probably get a fact when they’re written (and actor cards should get 3 written by their player). Furthermore, once the last fact is added to a card (i.e. if the type of card dictates a d8, when the 8^th fact is added) it should be retired at the end of the scene.

Oh, and about 30 tokens per player is probably plenty.