After too long testing by myself I finally got to see the game played with real players (the promise of pizza seems to help gather willing participants). This friendly test didn’t go to completion – unfortunately only about 4 hours of slow play – but it did go a long way to helping me understand how some of the different elements are utilized by the players. Oh, and how important it is to triple check the manual. We stumbled as I had written “sum” instead of “average” for the share price calculation during a merger. Weeding out these issues is important but I’m kicking myself as I had hoped basic things like this wouldn’t creep in so we could concentrate on the overall experience. That will come with time I suppose.

The great part of playtesting, and gaming in large, is to see the different strategies employed by the players. I was particularly intrigued by the Waterloo start position taken by a regular gaming friend, a place I thought would be better suited to late game but was made to work rather successfully as an initial starting point. I guess, even though I have been scrutinizing, playing on and changing the map many of my original thoughts on good locations simply didn’t update with it. So I continued with my “tried and tested” starts.