"I mean, you can get a phone or a computer and use a tabletop simulator and show them off to people? If you walk around the game floor, I'm sure you'll find more curious and eager boardgamers to try your new game ideas than you know what to do with."

But where is phone. She totally doesn't have one. And navigating that right now sounds un-fun.

"I guess so. Think anyone would mind if I just set up half of one of them on one of the tables and invited people over? I could always just clear out if someone does." Shrug. "Yeah, I'll do that, thanks for the suggestion- I have to get over my own anxiety more often, huh?"

"That's so bold I think you'll get even more interest, honestly. Makes you really stand out."

"Fun!"

She'll go- 'To the bathroom' or something, somewhere out of sight at least, to pull things out of her tail of holding and set up her display- She does have a physical copy of Homestead, complete with nice wooden painted house and well and tool and animal and person and crop and fence pieces and so on- The rulebook is a leather-bound notebook, hand-written, and she has to go over it and cover everything with a translation into this language, which takes a bit.

And she whips up another fake chess set, and then sets them both up in initial position near each other on one of the tables, and smiles at people who look interested.

Weiss can find an emergency stairwell that seems almost abandoned, judging by how dusty and disused it is. A few minutes later, a trio of men make their way over to Weiss' table, almost salivating at seeing the completely alien games. "What's the more abstract game about? You know, the one with black and white pieces?"

So, they don't know chess.

...Weird. Weird weird weird if this is Earth. Which. It might not be. Other places can invent skyscrapers.

"'Chess', a piece capturing game for two players- Each player takes turns moving one piece according to the rules. Each piece moves a bit differently and can capture other pieces if it moves onto them. The goal of the game is to capture your opponent's king-" Tap. "By making it so there are no moves they can take that get the king out of danger. White moves first."

"I think that's a fun rule for who starts!" says one of the guys. "I play who wins?" he continues, leading the 2 others to begin playing chess. They're playing quickly, and poorly, and it quickly ends with white losing. "There's a really beautiful combinatorial explosion... I think you've managed to hit some real magic here, young lady." The man who just lost closes his eyes and begins slowly pacing, trying to come up with strategies for the game, occasionally making gestures to aid his thinking.

Next time, the winner and the third player are more slow and deliberate, but they still make blunders and incredibly short-sighted decisions. "Do you have this game out somewhere? I'm pretty sure you're well past needing playtesting for this, just going off my gut feeling. Every decision feels like it could go a billion ways, and I mean, it's symmetrical so you already know the balance is there."

'Young lady', pah! But she's in a good enough mood watching them enjoy it that it's just a momentary flicker of irritation.

(She makes sure to explain castling and the Weird Pawn Rules, too.)

"Oh, I didn't invent chess. You wouldn't believe me if I said where I did get it, though."

"Wait, what happened then? Not that it matters, this game kicks ass! I think it's very much time to show it to the world. If the other game is anywhere near as good, you'd want to show it for the world, too."

"Hmmmmm... I'm a bit less confident of Homestead's pedigree, I admit."

"Well, if you're wanting a playtest team so you can be more sure about that game, ask around? It won't hurt anyone, and I'm sure they'd be excited to help you make something if it turns out anywhere near as good as chess turned out to be."

Sure. These guys are nerdy enough she feels more comfortable ... imposing. She'll ask people who seem relatively unoccupied about playtesting a semi-cooperative worker placement game.

She gets positive responses from many of the people she asks, so she gets more than enough playtesters in no time at all.

The core concept here is cooperative but competitive. Up to six people have farmsteads and each turn is a 'year'. The four people on the farm can do a lot of different tasks, and each playable character has a special power that helps the community- Watering one field on every player's farm, or building the shared upgrades faster, or giving everyone a wood resource, or everyone a hired temp worker, and so on. You want to score the most points, and there's a lot of ways to score points, but if the community doesn't manage to build all the upgrades by end of turn 12, everyone loses, so you can't interfere with each other too much. There's a random event card stack and dice for a couple things and it's overall fairly complicated. There's card art, fantasy-theme, the water-every-field power is rain calling and so on.

The playtesters take to the game impressively quickly, as they can relate so much of the game to what they've played before; they have a lot of positive things to say the first time they play it. "There's probably a game store or library around here that has a 24/7 table? Means you could get feedback for this game about as fast as would be possible. I think it's fantastic, but it needs more eyes and more playtime for us to really know."

"That could be neat. Anyway, I'm glad people like it- I hired someone for the art and everything."

"Well, I can point you to one of the 24/7 shops if you wish? It's not just your game 24/7, of course. But a shop with a new game going through testing is going to get tons of players from all over, especially if the game is new and early in its design history."

"If you think that's a good next step...?"

"Well, it'd do more to find out how to make the game better than anything else I can think of? It sounds like that is a goal of yours, to me."

"Oh, I rarely think that far ahead," she says dismissively. "I try to enjoy whatever the moment brings."

He chuckles, ever so slightly, and even gives her a thumbs-up. "It's the easiest approach, and always works like magic whenever it works at all. Good luck."

She'll wait for the current round of chess players to finish and pack away her games at this point- The chess set will fade eventually anyway and they can always go make their own somewhere, or substitute pieces so whatever- And see if any of the games being played are interesting enough to join in on. She likes ones that let you stack advantage on advantage over the course of a game. Failing that, it's probably getting on in the day and she should maybe head back forestwards to get ready to sleep.

Looking around the tables, Weiss sees a kind of RISK clone that adds the ability to play cards with special effects drawn from a common pool; it seems to have the similar kind of growing advantage that a normal RISK game has, with the cards being better for weaker players and making it harder to run away with the game.

She'll play Not Risk if someone's free for that. Try to see things in terms of expected advantage...

The game is really fun! It's different in a way that really makes the game much more interesting and unpredictable. The time flies as she plays a game.