Now that I had a playable prototype (with a theme and everything!) it was time to show it to more players. This time however, I didn’t have a playtest group. Not only that, it was July 2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone was at home in quarantine, and it would have been irresponsible to break it to get someone to playtest my game. Time to get creative!

My cousin Miguel wanted to try it, so I improvised a setup with a tripod and a webcam in order to run a playtest through Skype. Since Cortiça has no hidden information, I could handle the cards for both of us. All he had to do was tell me his move.

It worked but it was not ideal. The tripod had to be very close to the table and I had to be extra careful not to bump it with either my arms or my feet. It was tricky to light the cards without getting glare on the card sleeves and my camera’s resolution was a bit too low to keep up with the text on the cards. It was finally time to take Tabletop Simulator for a spin.

Recreating the game in Tabletop Simulator was straightforward. Once I had properly formatted files (one image with all the card fronts, another with all the backs), importing the cards was a breeze. That took care of the components! At this stage I didn’t want to get into scripting or automation because the game was still in a very fluid state where it could change drastically from one playtest to the next.

Tabletop Simulator has a lot of potential but its interface often gets in the way, complicating simple things such as tucking a card under another. Even after learning its controls, it still feels like playing a game while wearing boxing gloves. This can affect playtests in a number of ways. Due to its cost and controls, the players who are willing to playtest are often very involved in the hobby. A more casual player would still have to go through its learning curve, and it will color their opinion of the game. In addition, games tend to run longer than they would with a physical prototype.

In this occasion though, it suited me very well. I was even able to find a workaround for several of the technical issues such as its price and interface. Just like my playtest with Miguel, I could run Tabletop Simulator on my machine and share my screen, moving the cards for both players. This allowed me to playtest with people that didn’t own Tabletop Simulator, and they didn’t even have to learn the controls!

All the while I continued playtesting at home with Sara, always patient and supportive. The game took shape as we tried different strategies and made adjustments. My digital notes gradually turned into the game’s rulebook – but that’s a topic for the next article, where we’ll cover the contest submission.

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At the end of Part 1 I had a high level idea of how the game could work, but it hadn’t been tested and I had yet to define what it would be about.

At this point I could either look for a theme to design the game around, or try to get the game’s basic rules to work and then find a theme that fits. The good thing is, there is generally no wrong answer here. As long as they’re in tune in the end, you can start however you want.

Given the strict component count for the competition (18 cards!) there was a risk of falling in love with a theme that demanded more components, or that would make me want to stretch the definition of a worker placement game to the point where it would no longer qualify for the competition. Gameplay it is, then!

There was still one question left to answer before assembling the first prototype: I knew what 13 of the cards will be used for, but what about the other 5? I gave each player an additional resource type to allow for more depth in their actions. The other three were made into public double-sided goal cards which would change throughout the game. These were meant to add variability and to help prevent a dominant strategy, which is when you have a strategy that’s so powerful that there is no reason to do anything else. Watch out for those, they can sap all the fun out of a game!

The first playtest went well. The core system worked, the economy needed another pass (but that’s to be expected!), and the game took exactly one hour, which is a lot longer than I would like. After a few tweaks, it worked a lot better! It was finally time to start looking for a theme.

As I wrote in Part 1, I wanted this game to be about a facet of Portuguese culture that I hadn’t seen represented in boardgames before. Turns out, there are plenty of those! After a fun brainstorm session with Sara Mena, we ended with an A4 page full of possibilities. There was one tricky aspect, however…

The core of the game is resource conversion, which could suggest a theme of harvesting or manufacturing something, but there is an extra wrinkle that doesn’t line up with the standard manufacturing process. In the game you use your workers to gather A to turn into B, which you can use to get C. Think of C as points: once you reach a specific amount, you win. There are several ways to turn combinations of A and B into C, but you can also can turn C back into a larger amount of B! That’s because I wanted to give players the option to spend their hard-earned points for a chance of getting even more later on – but will they have enough time to do it? This could also work as a catch-up mechanism, because it gives a losing player a chance to sprint ahead.

The obvious solution would be for C to be money, so exchanging it for B could represent buying it, but since getting C is the goal of the game, that could easily be interpreted as “money is good”, and I did not want that at all. I’d much prefer if my game could help people forget about capitalism for a bit.

Fortunately, there was one theme on the list that could fit all of the gameplay so far: Cork!

Cork is a big deal in Portuguese culture. You may have only seen it as wine stoppers, but has long been used to make tools and the recent invention of cork fabric has greatly expanded its possibilities. Not only can you make things like wallets, umbrellas, hats and even postcards out of it, but it can also be recycled.

So now I have a theme! When applied to my game, the result is: The players will assign their workers to grow cork oaks, extract the bark and process it into different products made out of cork. Players can also recycle their cork, which gives them raw material which they can turn into other products. I also had a name: “Cortiça” (/kuɾˈti.sɐ/), the Portuguese word for Cork.

On the next article we’ll cover playtesting during a pandemic.

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