The Essen Experiment, or how we taught a game to hundreds of people in a language we don’t speak

As some of you already know, Spiel in Essen is the most celebrated board game event in the world. It took place October 26–29, and as always we had an excellent time there. Defying expectations, we didn’t travel to Germany just to drink beers and have fun — perks we didn’t deny ourselves anyway. Instead, we wanted to use this opportunity to meet players, campaign backers, and publishers.

Setting up the Experiment

Spiel is strategically positioned halfway between the end of our Indiegogo campaign and the beginning of Early Acess for the Dized backers. That made it the ideal place to test the app with as many real game sessions as possible.

Our dev team put in a few extra hours in the weeks preceding the fair, making sure that attendants could experience a fully working Kingdomino Tutorial. One of the most significant obstacles to communicating Dized is, in fact, that no amount of words can substitute trying it in person — so it was of the utmost importance for us to concretely show why Dized has a significant edge on all other existing ways to learn a game.

Coming in really hot with the app build, we kept updating it during the fair to reflect feedback and make it as close as possible to the final product. We could showcase comprehensive instructions and voice-over in both English and German, along with an interactive tool to help score points at the end of the game. Oh, and we had funny meeples and sheep bumping around.

Our booth wasn’t what you would expect, and it didn’t look like anything we did before: it was large and spacious, with a small corner for meetings and the rest of the space dedicated to learning Kingdomino with Dized. Our three “researchers“ — they wore white coats, and that’s how science works — welcomed thousands of curious people to the booth. The odd part was that they almost never taught the game or answered rule questions from players: all they had to do was pitch Dized, invite people to sit down and play, and collect feedback during and after the game. They had much lighter days using the app than demo people on other booths, who had to explain the same game over and over for four straight days!

What we learned

As our tables were almost always busy with gamers eager to play the latest Spiel des Jahres, and curious to learn it with Dized, we gathered a considerable amount of data. Over 200 games were played over four days, and more than 700 test subjects left feedback on the experience — obliterating our reserve of forms by Sunday morning.

Results turned out to be encouraging: overall, 88% judged their experience “cool” or “awesome,” and almost as many told us they were willing to learn other games with Dized. Two-thirds of the players even claimed they preferred Dized over learning from a rulebook! But the best hint of how people enjoyed it may be that almost all of them played until the end of the game. Even those who had sat down only to see how the app worked eventually stayed for the whole game.

Along with trivial bugs (already fixed), the most mentioned issue was pace. 8% of the respondents — all experienced players — wished the tutorial was faster, or that some parts of it could be skipped. Kingdomino is a simple game, and we designed the Tutorial so even families and occasional players could learn and remember all the rules. More seasoned gamers can find the explanation of some concepts a bit redundant, so we will consider tuning the pace to the specific user profile and playing habits. That said, we’re reasonably sure this feedback won’t apply to heavier games — but providing more skipping options is something we will reflect upon.

We also asked our test subjects what games they wish they could learn with Dized. 133 unique titles were mentioned, from Dobble to Civilization, including classics like Chess and new releases like Chartestone. We were comforted to see 7 Wonders, Scythe and even Kingdomino ended up quite high in the list of requested games, as they already belong in our library. Other popular requests were euro-style classics — Dominion, Agricola, Settlers of Catan, Pandemic — and heavier games which would definitely benefit from Tutorials — Twilight Imperium, Alchemists, Terraforming Mars, Terra Mystica, and Arkham Horror. Among those, we also had requests for a game we all wish we knew exactly how to play: Monopoly!

This is just the beginning

As we are working hard to deliver the Tutorials for the games already announced, we are also trying to get all those other titles on Dized. And Spiel was a great place to talk with publishers of all sizes — besides planned meetings, many happened spontaneously at the booth. Everyone we met with was interested in the project, and we’re quite excited to work with all of them. You can expect the list of onboard publishers to grow significantly in the near future. ;)

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