Update #03:The Big Post-Gen Con Blog Post

WOW!

The response that Black Hats received at GenCon was greater than we could have hoped for. In addition to the 24 players who played with us in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, we were able to run 8 demo tables in Lucas Oil Stadium which were attended by a total of 35 more!

Over 50 gamers decided to spend some of their limited time at GenCon playing Black Hats. With so much to do and so many other games available we consider it an honor that anyone would take a chance on us. For those who did take that chance, the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.​

This was not only our first time bringing Black Hats out in to such a public venue but also our first time running events at a convention ourselves. We were absolutely wiped by the end of the day on Sunday but it was so worth it to see so many people having fun with the game. Every time someone had an audible "aha!" moment when they found a new line of play with their runners was more fuel in our tanks to keep working hard on this game.

I think as a game designer, if your goal is to make something that feels unique and new, it's important to somewhat work in isolation from other games. At least for my own brain, I find it too easy to let other games bleed too strongly into my own work. There is something to be said for not being too strongly steeped in genre convention.

For the same reason, I think it is also important to be extremely judicious in parsing player feedback. There is a balance to be found between letting players make design choices for you and being too stubborn to kill your design babies when you are told they don't work.

Okay, but why am I going on a random diatribe about authorial intent in game design... Because for over 2 years we worked in that isolated bubble on a game that we were growing to love, showing it to handfuls of very specific players at a time and we had no idea if anyone else was even going to like it, much less love it.

If we came out of this design with a game that only ever got played on the kitchen table by ourselves and our friends, that would've been enough. We thought Black Hats was good, but we had no idea if you would. It is both humbling and inspiring that literally dozens of strangers told us to keep going after getting their hands on it.

So that is what we are going to do!

The feedback was positive, but it was not without many pearls of wisdom that we are already going about applying to Black Hats.

We got a lot of good ideas about reminder rules text that would be useful on the board. The structure of Systems < Subnets < Network is something that could easily be graphically represented. We're also expanding the "on your turn" section to the right which currently only encapsulates the runner actions. Placing outlines on the board for your deck and discard was also a common request.

We are also re-evaluating the importance of the rootkit mechanic. It is commonly something that players forget to do and the impact of preventing hacking on an individual system doesn't often feel particularly impactful. Many of the abilities currently tied to rootkit location can be re-worked to key off allied runner positions which raises the importance of your non-data carrying runners.

Other great suggestions included some ways to tighten up some of the wording on cards to make them faster to read and more clear. Shortening data packet to simply data for example is something we will almost certainly be implementing along with a few other tweaks.

In the coming weeks we will be making a lot of updates to the TTS mod to reflect this feedback in addition to adding art for new runners.

​Thank you for joining us, this is just the beginning!