Pine Island Playtesters
Shoot me an email (jasper@pineislandgames.com) if you’d like to become a Pine Island Playtester.
As our company has become more established, it’s been remarkable and humbling watching our community grow. The blog now gets thousands of reads a month just from older articles and passive traffic, our mailing list is in the thousands, we have a healthy discord community for Sigil, and people recognize my name and reach out to me regularly on forums.
We’re also getting more game submissions than ever.
And, we’re starting to develop a solid workflow around new submissions.
The First Cut
After looking at hundreds of board game submissions, I’ve learned that submission review is not one of my strengths. I love games, I love playing games, and I love learning new games. But, I don’t like learning from a rulebook, and I don’t like looking at a sell sheet and trying to puzzle out whether a game will be fun.
That’s where Adam comes in.
Adam Medeiros
Adam is a friend of the company who we first met at Pax Unplugged 2021. He’s been a huge help as a friend to bounce ideas off of, is helping with Sigil’s project planning (he’s a Gantt master), and has been helping me with game submission reviews.
Adam is now handling our first cut of submissions. Most of this first round of cuts is games that clearly don’t fit our tenets, or have a lack of playtesting and revision. But, we also cut good games that just aren’t quite in our wheelhouse or don’t inspire us.
We are a small company with the capacity to pick up 1-2 games a year. And those 1-2 games come out of hundreds of submissions – so we have to be picky.
The Playtest
Adam and I talk through the games that make it through round one. We talk about their strengths, weaknesses, the economics of producing them, where they’d fit in the market, and where they’d fit in our growing catalogue.
We have an evolving list of games that we want to take a closer look at.
Wild Meadow is a lovely tile laying game by designer Mitch Wallace that we discovered at Pax Unplugged 2022
We reach out to those games’ designers and arrange a playtest. These playtests are usually with the designer on TTS, although I have been sent physical prototypes to test on our own.
Pine Island Playtesters
A relatively new addition to our community is our Pine Island Playtesters. These are insiders from the mailing list, discord, or Kickstarter who’ve expressed an interest in being more involved with the company.
We loop in our playtesters for the handful of games that we are seriously considering signing.
We usually have specific questions for our playtesters about game mechanisms, and how they view the game versus other games in the genre.
There is still room for improvement in our process. But, it’s come a long way, and it couldn’t be what it is, and we wouldn’t have the opportunities we have, without this amazing community.
If you’d like to be Pine Island Playtester and get a front row seat as we look at games to license, shoot me an email at jasper@pineislandgames.com.
