What I Learned at Protospiel Madison 2024 – Plus Fantasy Loot Brawl Debuts!

This past weekend, I had the chance to attend Protospiel Madison for the fourth time. If you’re new to the term “protospiel,” it is a convention where board and card game designers bring their creations to playtest with other designers and folks who just want to try out games! For a designer like me, these types of events are crucial to get feedback on how a game is coming along, whether it is fun, and what the pain points might be. 

I brought along my prototype of Fantasy Loot Brawl and got a few different groups to try it out. I also played two games. Below, I’m going to share about the two games I played and what I took away from each, as well as some thoughts on the evolution of Fantasy Loot Brawl.

Fantasy Loot Brawl – An Easy Teach is Huge

I was pumped to bring Fantasy Loot Brawl, our next title, this year. In Fantasy Loot Brawl, your goal is to create the best lineup, team, or bracket picks in a variety of mini-games using the random nouns for the round. The party games mirror everyday sports activities like fantasy drafting and picking the winners in a bracket challenge. 

What I discovered during the playtesting was how much everyone appreciated a game that was easy to learn. For our first two games, Gamestormers and Doomscroll, the teaching process was not terribly long, but it still took a bit to hop into the game. Each minute of teaching means another minute delay to the actual decisions, conversations, and tense moments that make games truly enjoyable! 

With Fantasy Loot Brawl, the familiarity of common activities like drafting players or filling out brackets means that the teaching goes quite smoothly for new players. Rather, it’s simply about players understanding HOW they score loot… and from there, we were off! It was one of the best features of the new game.

Primacy – Multiple Goals Add Intrigue

The first game I had the chance to play came from Alex and Bobo Wolf at Spielcraft Games – makers of For Glory and the upcoming release Cretaceous Rails. Their prototype, called Primacy, was a skirmish game where multiple factions are vying for control of land and public support in a post-apocalyptic world. I was a mafia-like group called the Aces, and I had my own abilities and upgrade paths based on this role.

In the game, players aim to control areas of the map where they gain funds, troops, and areas where they can broadcast their messaging to gain valuable public relations. What really stands out about the game, however, is the battle system. When one player attempts to enter territory controlled by another, they secretly play battle cards on any of three skirmish “goals” – PR, Loot, and Conquest. Winning the PR category enhances how much you can broadcast your message at the end of each round, loot gives you benefits based on the space you are on, and conquest determines who gets control of the area entered. With the three different goals, a player can potentially focus on the one area he or she wants, or try to spread out their cards to take two or three areas instead. The reveal of each player’s cards makes for a fantastically tense moment, and my main takeaway was that the balancing of multiple goals makes for a great feature of a game design.

Dungeon Panic – A Simple Concept Can Still be Deep

The next game I played came from Doug Anderson at Playmoria Games. His game, Dungeon Panic: Escape or Nah, was elegant in its simplicity. The goal is straightforward – you are a hero attempting to escape the dungeon by reaching the door with a key and gem in hand. Once you try to escape, the dragon on the board chases you down until you roll five critical hits on the game dice.

What’s also incredibly simple about the game is the turn structure and the board. On your turn, you roll three dice (that you can upgrade to four or five dice with items). These dice determine whether you can move, find treasure cards, or whether you must move the dragon. In addition, the board is made up of 12 spaces arranged in a square shape – it sounds too simple, but the limited space makes for an exciting race to avoid the dragon, chase down the door to the dungeon, and search for the treasure you need to escape.

With such a simple premise, board, and turn structure, I thought the game would have little depth, but I was wrong! Treasure cards may be the keys and gems you seek, but the game features tons of different spells, trinkets, and magical items you can use to increase your chances of success, slow the dragon, or even sabotage your opponents. The variety to the cards and randomness of the dice rolls led to a game that was simple to learn, yet hard to master. 

Overall I had another fantastic Protospiel Madison and learned some great game design strategies from playing other designers’ games. And, most of all, I learned that people REALLY enjoyed playing our next game design, Fantasy Loot Brawl!