San Jose Protospiel 2016

Tables and tables of games, designers, and playtesters.

Whew, what a blur. This past weekend went by faster than I thought it would.

Friday through Sunday, I participated in the West Coast version of Protospiel, San Jose Protospiel. I met people from as far away as Reno, Nevada in this event where designers and players alike come to test out and try new tabletop games.

Although I wasn’t able to spend the evenings at the event, I did manage to get in almost two dozen playtests of a couple of new games I’m working on. Coming away from these tables, I received a lot of good feedback and praise for my designs. Definitely going to work towards bringing some of these new games to life.

Would you like to play "Paper Airplanes" with me?

Perhaps the most difficult part of this whole experience was realizing that I needed to sell my games in order to get people to test out my games. More on this in a future post but, in general, the beginning was slow before this realization. By the end of the second and third day, however, I found myself trying to find a way to escape the table:

Playtester 1: “Hey, I saw your game and I was wondering if we could try it out?”
Me: “Eeek, I was about to head out and get food.”
Playtester 2: “Awww, we saw how fun that last game looked and wanted to try one of them ourselves.”
Me: “Okay, let’s do this then. Which did you want to play?”

Speaking of hunger. I didn’t have lunch the second day. The third day, I was lucky enough to have my co-pilot bring me tea from Teaspoon and pineapple fried rice.

Thai food has never tasted so good.

Setting aside time to eat or having a friend to grab you food is definitely something I would recommend to those thinking of going next year.

Setting up "Escape the Room"

You might not be able to tell, but there was a lot of chaos, shouting, and laughter going on here.

Anyway, can’t wait for the next event. It was worth it from the standpoint of getting many helpful opinions and networking.

From new friendships made to awesome new games played, and everything in between, it’s still nice to be back home.

For now, I’ll rest. Tomorrow, I’ll set that paper airplane afloat.

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