Over the Chinese New Year holidays I managed to get some friends and family to help me playtest Pilgrim Poker. The rules were more or less final, but I wanted to get more different people to try it, to see whether there were any issues I hadn’t detected. This is stress testing the game. When you get people who have never played a game to try it, you can discover situations you have never seen before. New people bring new perspectives. For me it is important to see what people don’t understand when they learn a game. I need to do all I can to make learning the game easy, and playing the game fun. 

I enjoy observing how people play my games. Making games is about creating happy moments for people. It is satisfying when I see these moments. Here are some such moments I observed when watching my friends and family play Pilgrim Poker. 

The basic idea of the game is everyone draws one card, and whoever has the highest number wins. The twist is you know everyone else’s numbers, but you can’t see your own number. A round of play is similar to poker. Everyone commits to a base bet every round, and during the round you can raise that, and others can decide whether to call or to fold. If you think your card is weak, one action you can perform is to change your card. When you discard your old card, you will get to see what it is. When you take your new card, you can’t look at it. You only show it to everyone else. Sometimes you will sense that your card is small because other players challenge you to a side bet, i.e. a one-on-one duel. They may not know their own numbers, but when they see you have a small number, they know their chances are good in a side bet. If you have been challenged and you think you might lose, and if the change card action is still available, you probably want to take that when your turn comes. 

In the deck, the numbers go from 1 to 13, and each number occurs twice. One situation I have seen was my youngest uncle holding the 1 and deciding to change card. He could sense he had a weak card, so changing card was the right decision. When he discarded his 1 and saw what it was, he was relieved that he had made the right choice. When you discard a 1 to draw a new card, you can’t do any worse. When he drew his new card, everyone else started giggling. He didn’t do any worse, but he drew the other 1. 

Creating moments – extreme bad luck is hilarious.

In Pilgrim Poker, you start the game with $50. The base bet you need to pay every round is $1. When you raise, there is a cap of $10. If 6 players are playing, and someone raises the bet to $10, and everyone calls, the pool will be $60. This is a huge sum, more than what you start with. Some rounds can go like this, especially with players who are new to the game and are impetuous. Winning such a round is dizzying. When you sweep all those chips towards you and form a huge pile, you feel ecstatic. 

Creating moments – big wins are electrifying. 

Some moments are subtle, but they are just as satisfying to watch. I like watching people start to understand the intricacies of a game. The lightbulb moment. The aha moment. One player saw that another player with a 13 was challenged to a side bet. Normally 13 is the strongest card, and no sane person would want to challenge a 13, unless he is trying to bluff. The player seeing this challenge suddenly realised he knew why this was happening. He realised his own cards which he could not see was a special card, which made the smallest card win instead. 13 had become the weakest number because of this special power card being in play. 

Creating moments – little gems of tactics which players can discover and use are fun. 

One other type of moment that gives me much satisfaction is when players start appreciating the more advanced tactics. In Pilgrim Poker when you take a turn, you flip over an action card. You may perform the action specified by the card, and you may also choose not to use it. One of the action cards is Change Card. If you choose it, you may discard your current card, putting it out of play, and draw a new card. Most of the time when a new player chooses this action card, they will use the power and hope to draw a better card, because they are guessing their current card is weak. The lightbulb moment I sometimes see is a player who is confident about their card choosing Change Card and not using the power. They choose the card to prevent others from using it. They want to secure their victory. I try to make simple games which are easy to learn, but I also want to have some depth which players can discover as they play. 

One type of moment which I deliberately create will sound odd at first. I intentionally create moments of regret. Let me explain. This has happened to me several times when I took part in playtesting. Recently I saw this happen to Ah Yung. She had the 13, the strongest card in the deck. However she folded when someone else raised the stakes. It was a bluff, and at the time there was another player who had a high card too. Given what she knew (she didn’t know her own card), I can’t say she made a poor decision. Had she called and stayed in the round, she would have won a ton of chips. From the game design perspective, the feeling of regret makes you want to play again. It’s like the 2011 Taiwanese love story movie You are the Apple of My Eye. What you almost had but lost is always bitter-sweet and unforgettable. 

Creating moments – the feeling of loss, of what it could have been. 

The flip side of the missed opportunities would be the lucky escapes. You don’t have complete information, and you often have to make decisions based on your best guess. If another person challenges you to a side bet, you have to decide right now whether to accept the challenge. If you do, the side bet will only be resolved at the end of the round. If you don’t, you immediately pay half the bet amount. Often it is not easy to swallow your pride when you are challenged to a side bet. When someone raises, do you fold or call? The luckiest escapes are when you hold the 10. The 10 in Pilgrim Poker is Sun Wukong. The special power of the 10 is whether you win or lose with it, you gain or lose double the amount. Unless you have folded, i.e. dropped out of the round. Then if you would have lost, you don’t lose double. You just lose the amount you surrendered at the point you folded. If you would have lost while holding a 10, the difference can be between losing $1 and losing $20. The base bet is $1. If someone raises it to the max of $10, and if you call, you would lose $20. Avoiding a big loss is sometimes almost as satisfying as making a big win.