Reflections after our first playtest
Twenty friends gathered at 3 PM to play a game we'd spent a year building. By 5 PM, they were screaming at each other across the living room like NYSE traders. That was exactly the plan.
In mid-November 2025, we ran our first playtest — a 20 person scenario of Wizards vs Aliens, the first concept scenario that Mystrige was built around. For a first run, we were really motivated by the reception and feedback from our players.
How did we get here?
Back in November of 2024, Jake discussed hosting a Murder Mystery game for a New Year's eve party. While we really enjoyed playing the game, the legwork to organize the game was painful. Collecting people's emails, sending out their character and costume inspiration, printing and cutting PDF's into a booklet for each player, dealing with last minute cancellations, it really took away the effort we wanted to put into hosting a great social party game for our friends.
In early February, Jake reached out to me with an idea. He wanted to host another game in this genre, but this time, he wanted to write it. Having dabbled in game creation in the past and with a newfound interest in storytelling, Jake wanted to try to define a game. But the management aspect from last time was still bothering him; he asked if I could build something to make running the game easier. I was really excited by the idea and prototyped a proof-of-concept that night. This was a project that really excited both of us, and thus we began the work on Wizards vs. Aliens.
The art of designing a new game and building a game-platform at the same time
Jake and I worked on the project throughout 2025 leading up to the planned November launch. Jake had a really difficult task in determining how he could tell the story he wanted to tell, while making a fun, engaging experience for players. On the design front, there are things like how players win, what the game mechanics are, rules, etc. Then on the writing side — there is a lot of data in a game like this. For our (ambitious) 20 character game, across 3 rounds, with ~8-10 clues per round, that's roughly 250 unique clues. Plus, there are character motivations, interactions and win conditions to consider. It's really impressive that Jake pulled this off.
I thought about what we would need to do from a webapp perspective to facilitate it. Early into the project, I thought about how we could use this webapp for future scenarios, or, even run existing murder mystery games like the one we ran at our New Year's Eve party on this platform. Thus began the work to try to abstract the concepts of Wizards vs Aliens into the core concepts that would work for any game in the genre. This was a tricky task, and this rapid iteration was rough on the codebase, but, despite this, we had our working prototype ready for the game!
Game day
For the first game, I, Jake, and our close friends and co-authors James and Paul moderated, while 20 of our friends played as the 20 characters in Wizards vs Aliens. After months of preparation, Jake and I were really curious how the game would be received. Would players understand the mechanics? Would it be too hard? Too easy? At 3 PM, we started the game to find out.
We quickly saw that our players understood their characters and what they needed to do. Having reference material on their phones, easily accessible, helped guide interactions and keep the game flowing without needing to flip through booklets of paper. One of my personal concerns was that players would be inside their phone too much during gameplay, but instead, we observed that players were able to play the game largely in person and only refer to material between rounds or as a quick check during the rounds.
As the game progressed, players got more into their characters and worked to persuade others to support the causes of their win conditions. Our final round of Quorums (votes and persuasion) felt like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 80s. People running around, yelling, trying to collect information while simultaneously fighting for their cause. It was exactly the kind of experience we were designing for.
Once the round concluded, we got the best feedback we could hope for: "When is the next one coming out?"
Our first playtest of Wizards vs Aliens — November 2025
A 12-player version and a new scenario
Since that game, we have been preparing the next phase of Wizards vs Aliens and Mystrige. Jake has been adapting the scenario into a 12 player version, and I have been rewriting the app from the ground up to support multiple scenarios, sessions, and users to support the next phase of the project. We have a lot more work to validate the concept and improve on the gameplay. We have a few more playtests planned for the rest of 2026, with a new scenario targeted for Q4. If you want to be part of an upcoming playtest, sign up for the beta.
Special Thanks
There are some folks that made this happen that Jake and I wanted to call out in our first blog post:
Paul and James — Our co-writers, editors, spell-checkers, character-ideators, play-testers, and close friends. Thank you for contributing and supporting us in the development of this project. We couldn't have done it without both of you.
Tiff — For the amazing character artwork. When Jake told me we'd have character art, I didn't expect it to look so cool and on-theme with our story. Thank you for sharing your talent with us.
Lindsey — For being my rubber duck at every phase of the project. Thank you.