I started to play this a few dozen times, and boy was it time consuming. I also showed a round or two to my wife(who understands my crazy) and my friend who is a gamer, to see if the basic activity of playing a round was fun or interesting at all. I saw that as my minimum viable product--playing a single hand and seeing if any decisions get made or if you can get better by playing again.
A game would take me about an hour to do by myself, because every time I picked up a hand, I was confused what that player was supposed to be doing, as I had just played 3 other totally different turns. But this is the best way to figure out obvious mechanical or logical flaws in the design. I saw the constant brain-burn as a possible sign that I was at least on the track to making each player make meaningful choices. There was so much going on, I'd often obstruct one player's plans totally unintentionally.
A bit of a retrospective on that: I think that is going to continue to be the "feel" of the game, and I am happy for that. I like that every game gives the sense of being offended by another player who claims to be acting solely in self-interest. The inclusion of the Magic Seashell puts the opportunity to really push the limits of this effect. Just another way you get to know your game during development, rather than the process being totally intentional.
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The other issue was Scoring. I had considered the best way to go to be a race to a set number of points. However, I quickly found out that the game really dragged at the end sometimes just trying to get someone to cross that finish line, if everyone is going for low scoring sets. So I tried a few different victory conditions, and the one I settled on was a set number of points for the entire game. The game is over when the point total is exhausted. The Crab Market was born.
How big should this point total be, though? I had no idea, and honestly, it is still subject to change. But before I could determine that, I needed to determine how much the sets should be worth. So here's what I did. I made a shorthand for each set, and notated the results of every round on an index card.
I simply played round after round until I felt like I wanted the game to stop. Either because someone was getting buried, or it was just trading punches, or someone pulled off something really nice. Then I evaluated the results for each game. I tried three different scoring systems--straight incremental, top-weighted, and bottom-weighted. I wanted to know if there was a chance that someone could simply collect the lowest value, safest set every round and end up winning, or if the player that pulls off the big sets will smash everyone hopelessly. What I found was that it rarely made a significant difference in standings. The only thing it changed was causing either more ties or further chasm between winners and losers. In the interest of not having someone lose a 25 point game by 18 points, and to keep things simple, the scoring became what it is: 1-2-3-4.
Then I went back and notated the totals for each game. They hovered around 60 points, with the winner always having more than 15 points, so 60 for a four player game is where it stuck. Again, this is subject to change.
You can see I also write little notes, so I can go back and see what the results felt like. Did I notice that making a certain adjustment correlated to a change that made the game better or worse? The last one was the one that really told me I was ready to move on with this game, and playtest with people. I had come up with something that got worked and reworked into what felt like a game, though I have no idea if it is good or not yet.
A little cautionary tale, to share a shortcoming:
A lot of times, when you really have the design juices flowing and an idea shows up that is really good, it feels obvious. I have no idea what I used for a tiebreaker when I wrote this, as all I wrote was "tiebreaker: seashells". The whole game is about seashells. I am fairly certain that I meant "magic seashells", but I don't know how I expected to keep track of that. This idea may have been crap or gold, but my poor quality note means I will just never know.
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