Playtest Analytics

Track every session, collect player feedback, and discover which parts of your game get the most action.

On This Page

• Overview
• Creating Playtest Sessions
• Automatic Action Logging
• Session Analytics Dashboard
• Designer Insights
• Project Analytics
• Player Feedback System
• Custom Feedback Questions
• Exporting Data
• Action Items

Overview

When a playtest room runs, every meaningful action is logged automatically, card draws, dice rolls, component interactions, joins, and leaves. That raw data is aggregated into an analytics dashboard tied to a Playtest Session record that you own and control.

Automatic (from realtime rooms): card draws, dice rolls with face values, component pick-ups/moves/flips/locks, player joins and leaves, and feedback scores.

Manual (you record): player count, session duration, free-form notes, the version tested, a session label, and action items captured mid-session.

Creating Playtest Sessions

Automatically from a Realtime Room

When you close a realtime playtest room, a session is automatically saved containing all the action-log data from that room. It's attached to the project the room came from. Action data is preserved even if the room closed before players submitted feedback.

Create Manually

For in-person playtests or other platforms:

1. Open your project → click the Playtests tab.
2. Click + New Playtest.
3. Fill in player count, duration (minutes), notes, and optionally the version tested.
4. Click Create Playtest.

Renaming Sessions

On the session list, hover a session name and click the pencil icon to rename it inline, e.g. "Version 2, Con Demo" or "Balance Test, December".

Automatic Action Logging

During a realtime session these are logged in the background with no extra steps:

• Card events: drawn (which card, deck, player), played/used, added to hand, flipped.
• Dice events: die rolled (which die, face, who), coin flipped (result).
• Component events: spawned, picked up / moved, locked/unlocked, deck shuffled, bag drawn.
• Session events: player joined/left (name, timestamp), room created/closed, feedback submitted.

Privacy note: logs record the player's chosen display name and the component name, no personal information beyond the display name is stored.

Analytics Dashboard

Open any playtest session to view the full dashboard (visible only if the session has logged actions).

Quick Stats Bar

Card Draws by Deck

For each deck: total draws, how many players drew from it, and which unique cards came out. Answers "Was my Action Deck actually used? Are players ignoring certain decks?"

Dice Roll Statistics

For each die type: total rolls, average result, min/max seen, and a full distribution of face values, verifying whether real-play rolls match the Probability Calculators.

Component Interaction Heatmap

A ranked table of every component touched, sorted by total interactions: name, type, interaction count, which actions happened, and which players touched it. The most-used rise to the top; "dead" components nobody picked up fall to the bottom.

Most Used Cards

A visual gallery of the top 15 most-played cards with images, play counts, and how many distinct players played each, great for spotting power imbalances or universally avoided cards.

Dice Fairness Histogram

Per die, a per-face bar chart of how often each face came up, with a dashed "fair" line showing a perfectly balanced result. Bars far from the line (over enough rolls) flag a skew worth tracking.

Draw vs. Play (Dead-Card Detection)

Per card, how many times it was drawn versus played. A tall "drawn" bar with little "played" beside it is a candidate dead card, too weak, too situational, or unclear.

Session Pulse & Pacing

The session's dominant mechanic (card / dice / movement), action rate (actions per minute), total actions, and an engagement spread showing how evenly players participated.

Designer Insights

Above the charts, the dashboard surfaces auto-generated observations, each paired with a concrete suggestion and color-coded by severity (green = good, blue = info, amber = warning, red = needs attention):

• Player engagement balance: flags when one player made far more actions than others.
• Game pacing: reads actions-per-minute as low (downtime), high (rushed), or healthy.
• Deck & card balance: surfaces a dominant deck or an over-drawn card.
• Dice fairness: calls out a die whose average is well off its expected value.
• Session character & hotspots: names the dominant action type and any component drawing an outsized share of interactions.
• Player sentiment: summarizes feedback ratings and points you to the comments.

Project Analytics

A single session is one data point; the real signal is what repeats. Open your project page and expand the Project Analytics panel to see patterns rolled up across recorded sessions:

• Trend line: average rating and action pace per session, in order.
• Dead cards: cards drawn repeatedly across sessions but never played.
• Deck dominance: each deck's share of all draws across every session.
• Dice fairness: every recorded roll aggregated, where variance evens out.
• Cross-session insights: e.g. ratings trending up/down, a persistently dominant deck.

The panel only appears once you have recorded sessions with logged actions. For large histories, the dashboard aggregates recent sessions first and warms up older ones in the background.

Player Feedback System

How Players Submit Feedback

During a session, players click the Submit Feedback button in the top bar at any time. The default form asks for Fun Factor, Difficulty, and Rule Clarity ratings (1–10), a "Would you play this game again?" yes/no, your favorite part, what could be improved, and any additional comments. Feedback is recorded under the player's display name, and players can submit more than once.

Viewing Feedback

Open a playtest session → scroll to the Feedback section. All submissions show the player name, rating, and full comment text. The session overview card shows the total feedback count.

Tips for Better Feedback

• Ask players to submit before leaving the room, it's easy to forget afterward.
• Run voice chat and take notes on verbal reactions too.
• Give players specific questions ("Did turn order feel fair? Did the end game feel rushed?").
• Compare feedback across sessions of the same version to spot consistent themes.

Custom Feedback Questions

Pro Feature. Replace the built-in form with your own project-specific questions for targeted, structured data.

Where to set it up: project page → Customize in the Feedback Form card (also reachable from the Playtests list or an individual session via the gear icon). All playtests under that project use your questions; players see them in the same in-room modal.

• Add as many questions as you need and drag to reorder.
• Mark a question Required to prevent submitting without it.
• Use Reset to Default to restore the built-in questions.
• Changes take effect immediately.

Keep questions short, use rating scales for trends, add one open-ended question at the end, and only mark truly critical questions as required.

Exporting Data

Each session can be exported from the session detail page:

• CSV Export: opens in Excel/Google Sheets; one row per logged action event (timestamp, participant, action type, action data). Good for sharing the raw event log with collaborators.
• JSON Export: a structured dump of session metadata, participants, actions, summary, and designer analytics, for programmatic analysis or archiving.

Separately, you can export your full component list from the project page as PDF (bill of materials) or CSV (component data).

Action Items

A lightweight way to capture design notes during a session without interrupting play, visible only to the designer.

• Create: in the realtime room, right-click the empty table → Add Action Item, type your note, and save. See the Realtime Playtest guide.
• Where they appear: the playtest session page and a paginated panel on the project dashboard (sorted open-first).
• Manage: mark complete (moves to bottom, strikethrough, with a completion date), delete with confirmation, or click the session link to jump to that session's analytics.

Workflow tip: use action items for design changes to address between sessions, then review them on the project dashboard before your next session.

Best Practices

• Remind players to submit feedback before the room closes.
• Review the heatmap, do the most-used components match your game's intended focus?
• Check dice statistics against your Probability Calculator results.
• Near-zero interactions on a component → it's probably forgettable. One player dominating → others may feel sidelined.
• Run 3–5 sessions before major rule changes, small samples are noisy. Compare ratings across versions to confirm improvements are real.