Protospiel Twin Cities – May 2025

I have never been to a tabletop convention before. So I was extremely excited to go to Protospiel Twin Cities back in May!

Protospiel is an event where game designers bring their unfinished, unpolished, and incomplete games for playtesters to play and give feedback on!

It was a three day event, though due to my schedule I was only able to attend Friday during the day. Because of this, I only attended as a playtester, and not a designer.

I met some really fun people, and got to play some games that were already fun! As well as some games that needed a bit more time in the oven.

Here are the games I played.

Star Wars Game – Order 66

This game is a cooperative game themed when Order 66 occurs in the Star Wars universe. You are a young jedi, and need to get keys on a modular map, deliver them to another spot on the map, and then guide your master to safety to escape. You need to do this while being as quiet as possible, as noise is generated by the actions you take, and stormtroopers appear where there is noise. Then, at some point, Anakin shows up and starts killing everything.

This game had a really fun mechanism where you add abilities to different slots in your lightsaber, which over time allowed you to do more and more powerful actions. It was also very puzzle-like, which is not my preference but the designers clearly enjoyed – so I think they hit the mark on that side of things.

I think the powers needed tweaking. Healing was weak, and pushing/pulling stormtroopers with the force was almost always worse than just attacking them. The noise mechanism was cool, and certainly got things overwhelming – but at some point, even before Anakin showed up, we realized the game was pretty much lost.

It’s a cool idea with an awesome lightsaber mechanic, but I think it needed more time to bake.

Citadels Duel

Funny story – I sat down to play, and the designer forgot some cards he needed. No worries, but I was sad to miss out on this one.

Dice Factory

Charles, one of the playtesters I played with for the Star Wars game designed Dice Factory, which was probably my favorite game of the day. 

In this game, you are using cubes to build small shapes with simple combination color requirements (must have half yellow, must have more red than blue, etc). Once a shape was complete, you scored points and could begin on another one. To get cubes, in order each player put two dice into a cup, declared the color of ONE of the dice, and then everyone rolled. If the combination of all dice exceeded the industry limit, no one got cubes of that color. Otherwise, everyone got cubes of the color they rolled.

It was super fun! The strategy behind what color dice to use was fun to decide, and while you couldn’t lie during our playtest (though he had tested that variant), at some point in the game you could get three or even four dice. So there was a bit of a “bluff” where you could say “blue” but have 3 yellows and 1 blue in the cup.

Determining where the cubes go was fun too. There were simple yet engaging decisions in how to achieve building the shape, and there were other “investments” the cubes could go towards, that would improve your ability to get cubes, or raise the industry limit for a given color, which allowed more cubes of that color to be produced from dice rolls.

Very fun game. It needed a bit more focus and a few tweaks, but I think there was something really fun there for Charles.

Math Games Book

One designer had a corner table, with a bunch of laminated papers and dry erase markers. His name was Ben Orlin, and he had already published a book called Math Games with Bad Drawings. He was playtesting additional math and logic puzzles for his next venture.

Not all the puzzles caught my interest, but the ones including geometry, deduction, logic, and wordplay did. I did probably 5 puzzles in his stack.

This was super fun! This was my second favorite game – if you can call it that – during the convention. I wasn’t able to solve all of them, but I was able to solve most of them. I also felt helpful, as I caught a few inconsistencies or missing pieces of communication in the writeup.

Overall a cool experience, and I am excited to someday grab his book.

Cooking Game

I played a two player version of this cooking game with the designer, Sage.

It was pretty fun! You drew cards (which were different ingredients). Each ingredient required some amount of “heat” to cook. Then you aligned your cards on a heat track vertically, and played a push-your-luck dice selection and rolling game, trying to roll enough heat (and other resources) to cook your new dish just right. Once complete, you put your finished dish on a table, and scored extra points depending on how you aligned that dish with the other dishes already on your table.

The game was engaging, and funny. Weird flavor combinations were a lot of fun to put together, and the push your luck mechanism was a good time.

I think the game needed more time to bake (pun intended). There were a few areas that I think a player would get caught and have to take a really annoying turn just to gain money, and burning dishes was quite punishing. 

The game was also the most “homemade” game I played. This probably impacted my enjoyment level. Seeing art for the ingredients would probably have increased my enjoyment.

Despite some rough areas, the game has a lot of promise, and was much further along than the Star Wars game I played. I will certainly keep my eye out for this if it gets published in the future, because it will be an auto-buy.

The Publish or Perish Game

This game is finished, and I think being fulfilled or is already fulfilled through Kickstarter? Either way, it’s a finished and published game. It didn’t quite fit the theme of the convention, but oh well.

The game is a party style game with some harsh “take-that” elements, where you take the place of an academic publishing papers, defending your thesis, and answering trivia questions on the side for bonuses. The game has a cynical tone to it, but has some very hilarious humor.

If you are in academia at all, I think this game is a blast. Lots of humor around the area of publishing papers, silliness mixed with cynicism, and the trivia is pretty tough.

However, if you don’t live in that type of world, I’m not sure how much of the game will appeal to you. Its take that elements are harsh, and it is strongly themed with academic cynicism and skepticism throughout.

I rated it a 5.5, because for me that’s where it stands. I could see others (who the theme works better for) putting this at a 7 or 8 (though the take-that elements can really ruin someone’s game quickly).

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed this so much! It was great to meet other designers, play games, and talk game design all day. I played some super fun games, some creative games, and had great conversations with designers from all sorts of backgrounds. I will be doing this again next year if I have the availability.

I also want to keep tabs on what local designers are publishing. If any of the games I played during the convention get published, I’ll be buying a copy for sure.

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