The greatest day of board gaming in Harrisburg has concluded. Harrisburg Board Game Day (HBGD) was held this past Saturday, August 29, at Strawberry Square. It’s an all-day, free community event for all things board games. It’s hosted by the Harrisburg Board Game Alliance, of which I’m Vice President. Once we tallied up the numbers, we had just over 600 attendees this year. This broke our goal of 500, which is super exciting.
Game Designer Coordinator
For the event, I was the game designer coordinator this year, so I wanted to share my experience with that. We had 10 participants in Designer Alley, which focused on established designers who had products they wanted to sell and/or promote.
One of the most exciting parts was seeing games that had appeared at previous Board Game Days as demos or prototypes, like Scrapbots, Medieval Merchants, and Sheep, now show up as completed products for sale. I love to see that progression, and I want the event to support it. We are a space for designers to bring an idea to the table, improving it over time, and eventually getting it into players’ hands. I didn’t get to spend as much time downstairs with them as I would have liked, but everyone I talked to had very positive things to say. They had a steady stream of customers and got the word out about their games to new audiences.
Playtesting and Demos
Upstairs, attendees were greeted by the Play and Win and game libraries hosted by the Bodhana Group. The first section of tables they came to was the Break My Game demo and playtesting area, where over a dozen designers brought games in every stage of development. Some were polished, near-final versions, while others were paper prototypes covered in Sharpie-marked changes. This is where I brought my two games: Community Cats and Harrisburg 1878.
Every time I looked up, the tables were full. People were waiting in line to try specific games, and some designers were told, “I would buy this today if you had it.” I loved seeing that shared energy between designers and attendees. It made the whole section feel active, encouraging, and full of possibility. We also had a few visiting designers from New York!
Community Cats Playtesting
I was able to get a few playtests in with my games between other duties as assigned, including running home to print more sign-in sheets because we ran out. For Community Cats, one of my favorite moments is seeing the rules click on a player’s face. During my first playtest, I could tell the player understood the core game loop before I was even done explaining it. They started nodding along, as if the next rule felt obvious, which is usually a good sign that the design is moving in the right direction.
I also learned more about the game’s difficulty. Both playtests used random setups instead of the scenarios in the back of the rulebook, and even though the players seemed to have similar skill levels, the first game was probably too easy while the second offered a much better challenge. That tells me the setup may be doing more work than I realized, and HBGD gave me a clearer direction for what I need to test next.
Harrisburg 1878 Playtesting
As for Harrisburg 1878, I spent the week after Great Escape on the Lakes making some big changes before bringing it to HBGD. I tried to balance the game by making sure every resource could be used to develop some kind of asset. I changed the Prosperity track so that it was tied to trading resources rather than selling Consumer Goods, which are now called Furnishings. I also reduced the number of resources that could be developed and turned development into a simple one-resource-plus-one-action exchange instead of a set of complicated recipes.
The version I brought was very new and had never been playtested, but I was encouraged by how well the main loop of build, produce, and develop held together. It is becoming a strong engine builder with several different paths to scoring points. The teach still took longer than I wanted, but it did not seem confusing so much as full of moving parts, which feels appropriate for a game about industrialization. I haven’t done a post yet about Harrisburg 1878, so that will be coming next. I want to talk more about the history behind the choices I made in the design, and the challenge of making sure that history still comes through when I am not there to teach it.
Next Year
Hopefully we will have a date set soon for next year’s Board Game Day. It seems like a late summer date fits a lot of schedules, so we’ll likely stick with that. Personally, my biggest goal for next year is to bring in even more designers. We had a few visiting designers from New York this year, and with the Amtrak station right there, Harrisburg can be an easy trip for them. I also want to make sure we are reaching designers in Lancaster and the surrounding area. The more people and perspectives we can bring together, the more ideas we can have flowing around the room.
I know designers were excited to get playtesting in, but I also want to keep building the community around those playtests and create more opportunities for designers to meet, talk, and support each other. I have some investigating to do on how to make that happen. Subscribe to stay up to date on next year’s Board Game Day, Community Cats, Harrisburg 1878, and whatever else ends up in the midden next.
