Bizlandia Open Playtest is Live!

Congratulations, you're hired! To quote from the game: "Welcome to Bizlandia, a game of collaboration, cross-functional development, and faux-actively increasing your income potential with no glass ceiling! Though this kickoff meeting could have been an email, we are gathered here to build the foundation of a company like no other before."

I'm very excited to be launching an open playtest for Bizlandia. We've been working on Bizlandia for a long time and I'm excited to share it with a larger audience, have more people play the game, hear your feedback, and prepare for an actual physical release of the game. You can read about the game on the game page, but I wanted to just share a bit about the origin. In these posts I can also post a little bit about how the game has developed and changed throughout our playtests so far.

Before Questlandia: Updated Edition was released, and it may have been during the Kickstarter campaign for that game, the creators of Questlandia, Hannah Shaffer and Evan Rowland, posted on their Turtlebun Discord server their intention to create a Questlandia SRD. They had been disappointed that more games weren't developed using the Questlandia system. That gave me an idea.

I've always been a huge fan of corporate/workplace humor. The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, and Superstore are some of my favorite shows, I grew up on Clerks, Mission: Accomplished by Jeff Stormer is one of my favorite games, etc. In this light bulb moment on Discord I immediately thought of both the concept and the name for what would become Bizlandia.

At this point, Questlandia: Updated Edition was not released yet. The original versions of Bizlandia were all based on the original Questlandia. Even in the earliest playtests, one thing came across again and again about Bizlandia: it was very funny. There is nothing really magical about the humor, nothing special I did or wrote that brings it out. People absolutely love making fun of capitalism and corporate culture. Once the jokes start flowing, people start riffing off of each other, and then actual workplace stories start coming out in side chatter. 

Games of Bizlandia are notoriously long. But they're enjoyable as hell. We've had long conversations, repeatedly, about things to cut from the game to deal with that. The problem is that each part is so funny and so enjoyable that we don't want to cut them, and the side chatter and jokes that make the game funny are exactly what make the sessions long. So we're working on ways to handle that, alternate rules, options for how to play the game across multiple sessions, etc.

Once Questlandia: Updated Edition came out Bizlandia went through a big rules revision to meet the fabulous changes in that version of Questlandia. If you haven't played QUE, I highly encourage it! It's a fabulous game, and it's amazing to experience Questlandia and then Bizlandia in relatively short succession because even though they're based on the same basic rules, the feel and tone are vastly different.

I'm proud of Bizlandia and how it makes world building so hilarious. I'm excited to share the game with more people so the game can get some interest. I think a lot of people will enjoy bringing it to the table. I'm glad to be sharing it to you for free so you can play right away with  no barriers, and if you wish, give us feedback for our ongoing playtesting. The game is going to continue to see rules updates, I'm certain. There'll be more about rules development in future posts.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and check out Bizlandia. We hope you enjoy it! If you play the game, whether you fill out our playtesting feedback form or not, please let us know! We'd love to hear your experiences.