Reverse Court: Playtesting

District 12 (Group 12)

Game: Reverse Court

Reverse Court is a modified version of Solitaire. This version of the single player game utilizes the joker cards, cards stacked ascending order on the main game board, and the drawing of two cards from the deck. This game is targeted towards people of all ages.

Our rules were based around the original rules of solitaire. The first was the reversing of the way the cards can be stacked. The Ace and the King switched roles, that is that the Ace is the only card that is able to be moved to a blank space on the game board, and the king is placed in the [insert that word]. Cards are stacked in ascending order rather than descending. The second rule is that jokers may be exchanged then discarded for another card on the bottom of one of the piles. Our third rule was drawing two cards instead of one or three from the deck. This made it so that it was slightly more difficult to play the game, and created the need for a bit of strategy within the game.

During our playtests prior to presenting them to the higher classes, my partner and I tested the difficulty and success rate. The game proved to be a bit more challenging with the need to adjust to the ascending order, however the inclusion of the joker cards and being able to pick cards from the unrevealed cards in the piles on the main game board helped balance it out. The drawing of two cards also added to the difficulty, and made us think more about how we could play our cards in order to use the cards we were not able to previously.

During our observations of the 470 students playtesting our games, a lot of them seemed confused by our rule sheet. We received plenty of complements praising our game, one person even complementing that out of all the games he had played in the past two hours, ours was most unique and fun to play. Our main issue was, again, our rule sheet. The biggest suggestion we got was to use bullet points or numbered lists to help organize our rules and make them more clear to the player. Aside from the rule sheet, during the gameplay the students got very invested and concentrated on the game, a couple going as far as to actually win the game because they were so interested in it. All the reactions we got from the playtesters were positive.

In our group, both of us worked on each part of the project equally. Not one person did more work than the other and each part of the project was worked on together in person, and not apart communicating via email or text. With this strong immediate communication, the project went smoothly and efficiently.

This partnership in our group worked really well. Each of us had something to contribute and everything went pretty smoothly. Both of us offered ideas that were considered, and later playtested to see if they would work. During the playtests with the more advanced students, each of us saw our mistakes and both made a note to correct the issues within our game. In the future, I would hope things could go as smoothly as they did for this game. However, as the chance of that happening is very unlikely, I hope I can take what I learned that worked within this project and apply it to future groups and partnerships in order to hopefully replicate this great experience within this project.