What the session covers
Workshop schedule
- Day 1 - Morning:
- What playtesting is and is not. Writing testable hypotheses for strategy mechanics. Session structure and timing decisions.
- Day 1 - Afternoon:
- Recruiting and briefing playtesters. Setting up observation without influencing behaviour. Live practice run with a provided prototype.
- Day 2 - Morning:
- Analysing observation notes. Separating confusion signals from preference signals. Prioritising findings by design impact.
- Day 2 - Afternoon:
- Translating findings into design changes. Running iteration cycles efficiently. Building a repeatable playtesting process for your team.
Participants leave with a complete playtesting toolkit and a recorded debrief of the practice session from Day 1.
About this webinar
Playtesting strategy games is harder than it looks
Strategy games create a specific playtesting problem: players need enough time to understand the systems before their feedback becomes meaningful. A session that is too short produces surface-level reactions. One that is too long exhausts testers before they reach the content you actually need feedback on. Getting this balance right is the first thing this workshop addresses.
What most playtests get wrong
Watching someone play and asking what they thought afterwards is not playtesting, it is opinion gathering. Structured playtesting for strategy games involves specific observation protocols, task-based session design, and data collection that separates confusion from genuine dislike. These are learnable skills, not instincts.
Designing the test before the session
Every effective playtest starts with a specific question. Not whether the game is fun, but whether players understand the resource loop by turn eight, or whether the tutorial successfully communicates the concept of territory control. Vague questions produce vague answers. This workshop covers how to write testable hypotheses for strategy game mechanics.
Reading player behaviour, not just player feedback
What players say and what they do during a session frequently contradict each other. A player who says the pacing feels fine but spends eleven minutes on a decision that should take two is showing you something different from what they are telling you. Observation techniques for spotting these gaps are covered in the second half of the workshop.
Format
Delivered as a two-day intensive, either online or in person for teams in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Includes a full playtesting toolkit: session templates, observation sheets, debrief frameworks, and a post-test analysis guide.