❖ Version History ❖

1st of June – 1st of October 2022
While I was immersed in the process of designing the video formatting of the rule book for Calendra, there was also another major project going on in the background: setting up the massive undertaking that is peer-based reviews.

When it comes to game design in the modern world, I think one of the most critically important tasks of the process is making sure that other people who are professionally involved in the industry are given the chance to take your product & study it on their own terms: reading the rules, investigating the content, play testing the game, and seeing not only how well it functions when you are not around, but also allowing them to tell the world their opinions without your influence. Though it is horribly intimidating to take on this process, it does so much for the legitimacy of the game:

❖ You give your product the opportunity to be endorsed by influencers, ideally unbiased.

❖ You find out truths about your product that you would otherwise not be able to see from your own ‘creator’ perspective

❖ Publicity and attention is drawn to the product, creating advertising opportunities.

❖ Questions and problems that you would never have noticed get brought to your attention, because these reviewers do a lot of work with other games and see through to issues with a very clear lens.

If you do not take the chance on letting strangers like this into your atmosphere of game design, there are elements of the process that you will never get to experience. It simply should be done… but how does one go about this??? Where do you find reviewers, and how do you get involved in the process of working with them? Well, lets talk about what Librarium Games was up to this summer with our largest peer review process to date!

First Off: Where do I Find Reviewers?
This was a bit of a tricky process for me to undertake last year when we were working on The Great Chase project. It was our first game release, and it was a doozy trying to sort out what needed to get done, and how we might go about achieving that. I hadn’t even had the thought of getting peer reviews done until I started taking on the responsibilities of developing content for social media, like Instagram.

The instagram atmosphere is very rich with people who want to do review content for games, which is super clear to understand: It gives people a great visual media thing to work with that also allows them almost infinite access to content to discuss so long as they remain involved and have new games to share with the world. Luckily for both the reviewer and the game designer, our work feeds into each others workflow: I need people to review my games, and they need people to keep making games to review. It is a very mutually beneficial process.

But just finding reviewers on the social media planet is not the only place one should be looking. It does a great deal of positive work toward your goal: the reviews will be very visually driven with strong discussion and widespread reach in some ways, but in a sense, these reviews will also flicker by quickly in the stream, likely never to surface again or appear in search engines when someone wants to know more about the game.

So where else should one look? Well. I think the next best thing you could be doing is getting a strong presence in the Board Game Geek world:

These are a totally different kind of reviewer people. While they too want to seek out content to work with, their goal is not to draw attention to themselves in a “social” kind of way, and it is not nearly as visually driven. These reviewers are out for a different kind of blood: to leave a presence in the established community for the long term, with well thought out writing and genuine game stress tests as the driving forces. They want to make the BGG community a better place by adding a clear image into the page that holds all of the descriptions of any given game, and this is the point of this community: to make the board game market a more cohesive place for all.

But there is another very tricky challenge when it comes to the reviewer process:

How Do I Get as Many Reviews As Possible with Limited Resources??
Organizing how to have as many people playing the game for review as humanly possible while you may at best only have one or two copies of your game, and very likely not even a finished production prototype at that is a serious problem that should be prepared for ahead of time as much as possible.

This is indeed a real challenge. When we began the review process this year, we only had 3 total copies of Calendra, and none of them were our production quality game, they were all our heavily played prototypes, with varying levels of “completed” art / design. One of these copies needed to remain in house at all times, because this was our only edition available for local play while reviews were happening. The other two copies had made their way to four reviewers over the course of a month, because we very carefully reached out and timed our review sessions with people who we had strong communication with throughout the process about timeline and when they were allowed to have the game & deadlines for returning it.

Luckily, while this was going on we had already begun our manufacturing conversation, and that first prototype had arrived in the beginning of July. An additional 4 copies were to be sent along a few weeks later, but there was an interesting mailing issue that took place, so one package of four got delayed by a month and a second package of four was sent as well. With this going on, we suddenly found ourselves with 6 final-production copies available to work with (allowing us to retire the older prototypes). With dozens of conversations now happening and scheduling becoming a mess, we started getting games out to everyone as frequently as possible:

Without exaggeration, the timing of these plans could not have been working better. We had two games going out to the world each week for review, and after a few weeks of delay, each week another two would return. Wash, rinse, and repeat this process for three months and this is how we managed to attain almost a dozen reviewers in an incredibly short time span.

But. Keeping track of these locations, these timings, and also having conversations / questions to answer about the game across as many as three time zones was quite the task! To give you a more clear image of what this might look like, take a peek at this video of our reviewer locations for the 6 traveling copies of the game between June and September:

Though it is a lot of work to organize, it is also maybe one of the most fun parts to the game design process if you are ready for it. You get to have so many interesting conversations with both big and small players in the industry, and you never know what you are going to get yourself into!

The only other major importance to keep in mind right from the start of conversations with the reviewers is to make sure that there is a clear and cohesive timeline setup for them to publish their reviews. For us, this timeline revolves entirely around the timeline of updating our website & preparing our Kickstarter Campaign, which will now be the focus for the next three weeks.