Last Saturday was a chance to check out Creature in the Basement at Ducosim! It was a long and intense day, but I walked away with a lot of insights into what areas of improvement are still open. All in all, I managed to run 5 playtests with some mixed results. Check out below for more info about the playtests, what that means for future versions and what events you can find me at next. But first, some impressions!
Learnings
From the 5 playtests I ran, I got some mixed results. Some were really fun, while others were a slog. The biggest learning I could take from this is that if it takes too long for Activity to be added, the game does not provide any challenge. That’s random of course, so the game is a little inconsistent due to that. The good news is that in a lot of cases, the game is fun to play! Now just to handle those other situations.
Based on that and other findings, I’ve come up with the following list of major improvements I am planning to tackle before the next Ducosim takes place in January:
- Handle cases where one player’s Sanity drops faster than the other player’s Sanity.
- Make sure the game is more consistent, i.e. prevent games where no Activity spawns and there are no interesting choices to be made.
- Reduce the cost for cleaning up Activity.
- Improve the double escalation that currently exists. Right now, the game becomes harder both due to the Activity spawning more and the Stress Pool size decreasing, meaning you roll more dice more often.
- Scale the game by player count.
- Implement Phase 2.
Future Events
There’s lots of events coming up soon, with UK PonyCon where I’m part of staff and Spellenspektakel where I will be helping at the stand of Rite. I won’t be playtesting my game there, but feel free to stop by and say hi!
Then, on January 16th 2027, the next Ducosim is scheduled, where I will again have a table, with hopefully a shiny new version of Creature in the Basement!
If you want to stay up-to-date on upcoming events, do also check out the Upcoming Events page, or subscribe to the newsletter in the footer below!
Hope to see you at one of these events!
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