Behavioral Playtesting Service for Board Game Designers

Your players aren't giving you honest feedback

What they say after a session and what their decisions revealed during it are rarely the same thing.

Mirror captures the difference.

They're giving you comfortable feedback

See a Sample Report

Most Playtesting Tells You What Broke

Mirror Tells You Why

Standard feedback provides surface level. Rules that confused people. Turns that felt slow.

That's useful. But it's the surface.

Underneath it: the hesitation before a key decision. The moment trust broke and negotiation collapsed. The player who disengaged - not because the rules were unclear, but because the game gave them nothing to hold onto.

Those are behavioural signals. They don't show up in a feedback form. They shape whether players walk away wanting to play again.

What Is Mirror?

What would you do with this?

Pacing as a design problem, not a player problem: Dele's deliberation slowed the entire table across multiple turns. Other players absorbed it in silence until Gabriel publicly called him out. The game has no turn structure, no prompt, no mechanism to normalise pace - so the table had to police itself. That confrontation was the game's design failing, not the player's.
Designer action: Introduce a soft turn prompt - a sand timer, an in-app nudge, or a visible signal that a turn is running long. The player can override it, but the prompt removes the social burden from the table.
Resource mechanics that don't signal consequences: Kemi overcommitted her influence tokens securing a single business. In the turns that followed she had nothing to act with - she watched others move while she waited. She didn't know the tokens were gone until it was too late. The game never showed her the cost before she paid it.
Designer action: Make resource depletion visible in the moment of spending, not after. A token tracker, a visual indicator, or a rule that requires players to declare remaining tokens before bidding would change this decision without removing the risk.
Win condition invisible until the end: Five players spent three hours optimising for the wrong metric. They counted businesses and tracked cash - the visible numbers. Market Value, which decided the winner, was abstract until the final score. The player who won did so because he understood what he was competing for. The others didn't know until it was over.
Designer action: Introduce a live Market Value display - a scoreboard, an app view, or a reference card showing each player's current MV alongside their cash. This single change would alter how every acquisition decision is made.

This is what Mirror produces - not a list of what happened, but an explanation of why it happened. And what it reveals about how your players think.

Every session becomes a detailed behavioural report. Structured. Specific. Actionable.

Read The Full Report

How It Works

In-Person Or Digital. Wherever Your Game Is

In-person session: Players gather at a table. We observe, facilitate, and record. The full behavioural layer - body language, table dynamics, social pressure - is captured in real time.

Digital session: Players gather in the same room with screens. Your game runs on Tabletop Simulator or a digital format you provide. The social dynamics stay intact. The physical components are replaced. The insight isn't.

Either way, you receive a premium report analysing player psychology, decision-making patterns, personality self-selection versus observed behaviour, and specific design recommendations grounded in what we saw.

What Do You Get?

The Mirror Report includes:

Executive Summary and Key Takeaway
Session Overview and Outcome
Player Behaviour Insights - with personality match analysis
Key Moments - what happened and what it revealed
Game Flow - early, mid and late session analysis
Behaviour Patterns observed across players
Design Observations grounded in evidence
Specific Recommendations with expected outcomes
Final Reflection

Request a Session

Early Sessions Are Offered At No Cost

We're building our case study library. In exchange for a free session, we ask for your honest feedback on the process and permission to reference the report anonymously.

No commitment beyond that.

If you want to see what a session produces before you decide - the sample report is there.

See The Sample Report

Get in Touch with Us

We’re excited to hear from you! Reach out for inquiries about our board games or upcoming Kickstarter launch.

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03301335003

Support

info@spotlightgames.co.uk