UX/UI & Board Games, Ep. 8: How Playtesting Saves You From Your Own Genius

You design the perfect game.

Elegant mechanics. Clean iconography. Balanced cards.

Then five minutes into the first session, players break a rule you thought was obvious and turn your “tight economy engine” into slapstick.

Welcome to playtesting.

Some games build iteration into the box.

“Playtest” adjusts as you play, changing rules in response to what actually happens at the table.

“My City” evolves over many sessions, each round teaches you what works and what does not, one tile at a time.

Product design is not that different.

The first version is not the truth, it is a prototype wrapped in optimism.

Confusion is never just noise, it is a signal, balance is easier to feel than to calculate.

And those tiny “not sure what this does” moments - are pure gold.

Here is how we should apply it

🧭 Start with a test question, what do we want to learn today

🧪 Ship a scrappy build with instruments, log taps, dead ends, and time on task

👀 Watch without rescuing, note hesitations and backtracks as signals

🔧 Change one variable at a time, then retest the same path

🗂 Keep version notes, what we tried, what changed, what we learned

✅ Define exit criteria, what good looks like before you start

You do not test because your idea is broken, you test because clarity is earned, not declared. Read this on LinkedIn