This weekend marked a chance to playtest an unreleased prototype titled "The Debrief" - a game inspired by mashing up Jeff Stormer's Mission: Accomplished! with For the Queen. None of our friends could make it, so my partner and I were a party of two, a chance to see if the format works with lower player counts.

Intro Needs More Flavor

Probably the biggest pain point we uncovered was that the format of Tenkiwi suffers from not being able to immerse people in a genre. There's not pages of text and layout to pull people into the intended mindset. In a way, this is a  design choice to get the action started as quickly as possible. "We'll come up with the back story as we go" is mostly an approach stolen from For the Queen that doesn't necessarily translate directly across to other types of games though. 

I'm worried the quick start nature might be taking away some of the fun of immersing yourself in a setting. This is probably a place where getting some real art and finding good places to put it might do a lot of the leg work, but also the content of the intro cards could just use more setup for the story telling aspects (even just cultural touchstones?), instead of just the bits on how the rules are going to work with only a hint of flavor talking about "the mission went sideways and your team leader died". 

Playable at Lower Player Counts

The Debrief ruleset encourages a bit of competitiveness that is harder to achieve with two players, but we still managed to have a bit of fun. Maybe if we had each been able to play two characters that could have livened things up a bit. With the random prompts taking the role of mission control and throwing in complications, the game still managed to keep us both on our toes enough and spur ideas. 

I'm interested to see if Tenkiwi can do more cooperative but structured story telling that would better fit the types of games we like to play together when it's just the two of us. Next I may try something spooky for Halloween inspired by the gameplay in https://sniperserpent.itch.io/anomaly