Fractal Chronicles #6 - BGS and Balancing

But while we love working with other designers, we wanted more. Enter Fractal.

During the evaluation of a mobile strategy game, we had the idea to create a 4X Board game (my favorite genre <3) where the actions and choices of the players would impact the content of the game. This idea would later become the Aftermath legacy system. But first, we had to build a framework: the core game. 

A few hundreds hours later, we had our first prototype which turned out to be a very attractive game with a lot of potential. Our playtesters started asking “What are you waiting for?”. 

We got to work on the game to develop and refine it as much as possible and 3 years and 9 versions later, Fractal was finally ready. But to reach that point, a lot of expertise came into play to provide assistance, help and input. 

First, the BGS in-house testing team, which consists of a group of 12 players, our hardcore alpha group. Together, we spent countless hours testing the game a whopping 400 times (about, we kind of lost track after the first 100 😉 )

To that, we’ve also added the expertise of 3 professional companies providing us with external playtests and offering an unbiased counterpoint to validate or challenge our own results. They themselves ran the game about 80 times by now and are pretty expert at it. 

Finally, we use one-off testing whenever opportunity arises (which happens quite a lot within the tight-knit boardgaming community) to gather as many viewpoints and feedback as possible. 

Together, this diverse group of more than 40 people only bound by a common passion has been working tirelessly and daily on bringing the original Fractal vision to life. They’re constantly helping us push the limits of what we can accomplish, which is especially true for the Aftermath, our ambitious legacy campaign.

Because they contributed so much to Fractal and helped us grow and evolve as designers, we’d like to showcase the studios helping us with our playtesting and their role in the project. 

LITTLEHOUSE GAMES – SPAIN

Littlehouse games is one of the first companies to work on Fractal. Based in Spain, they provide professional playtest and game design for many companies. They also design and publish their own games that usually involve innovative mechanics and interactions (End of Line, Freedom, Quantum memory, and much more). They played an important role in the Fractal project, measuring the quality of life, and providing a lot of playtests with a roster of players with different expertise (from casual to hardcore 4X fan). Today, they’re helping us design the Automata and TTS module for Fractal.

KICKTESTERS – HUNGARY

Kicktester is a company from Hungary and its members boast an impressive 25 different role-playing games, more than a 1000 different board games, along with a dozen war games played and tested! They are definitely our hardcore group! They worked on several successful Kickstarter campaigns, like Perseverance and Ausonia. 

Their role on the Fractal project is to work heavily on mechanics and to search for interactions and ways to break the system (which they can’t find so far!)

CALDERA – GERMANY

Oliver and his group are a team of veteran german players and hardcore 4X fans who were so enthused by the project that they offered their help with the playtesting process. 

Their role (apart from general feedback and input) is to check coherence between components and language within the game.

We thank each and every person who contributed to Fractal, and we can’t wait for the campaign to share with them the success of the game. If you want to know more about us, our process and expertise, and our design philosophy, just reach out in the comments, we’re always happy to share our passion with this amazing community!