“Are we there yet?”

"When do you know you’re finished revising? When you’ve gone from making your writing better to merely making it different. That’s not always easy to determine, but it’s what makes you an author." - Jerry Jenkins, author of around 200 books

People who are learning to design games tend to lose the distinction between when a game is mechanically complete and when it is truly finished.   There’s complete as in “it works” (mechanically complete)  and complete as in “it’s not worth the time it would take to try to make it better” (polished as much as is practical). The latter is likely to be a much better game.

My “Game Design I” students were expected to individually create a tabletop game as a mostly-outside-of-class project.  Of course, we don’t have the time in one semester for them to produce a marketable game, because games take a lot of time, though unlimited resources (including willing playtesters) can reduce that time a lot.  I tell students we’re trying to get to a fairly advanced step along the way, with at least ten playtests.  This is enough to make a game with a fairly settled feature set, perhaps with major mechanics in place, but not enough to polish (and potentially make big revisions) to the gameplay and rules.

At this stage the game may appear to be mechanically complete.  It may even be a game that many people really like, though this is less likely.  But my experience is that the game may go through quite extensive changes, and it can certainly be polished so that it works better.  In other words, it may “work”, but it will not yet be nearly as good as it ought to be.

In particular, testing and polishing the rules of a tabletop game takes many plays by a great variety of people.  Here is where there’s a significant difference between tabletop and video games.  A video game makes the player follow the rules.  If there’s a programming error, then the player can take advantage of the “glitch”, if it doesn’t actually crash the game.  The focus question is, “does the programming accurately enforce what the designer intended.”  A tabletop game does not enforce the rules.  So the focus question is “can someone read the rules and play the game the way the designer intended it to be played.”

Even if the mechanics are fairly set, that is, even if the game “works” when played correctly, it’s very likely that many people reading the rules in their current state will not play the game correctly.  Just as cleaning up programming bugs can be very time-consuming because of the nature of programming, honing the rules can be very time-consuming, because so much playtesting is needed.

Reiner Knizia says that it's easy to get a game to an 80% stage, getting to 100% is hard. That's the difference between "it works" and "it's a good game."