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
• Views and Customize
• 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 feeds an analytics board on 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 and expand Playtesting.
2. Click + New Playtest.
3. Fill in player count, duration (minutes), notes, and optionally the version tested.
4. Click Create Playtest.

Renaming Sessions

In the Sessions tab, 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 a session from the Sessions tab of your project's Playtesting section to see its analytics board. Every section of the page is a widget, and you choose which widgets show, in what order and how wide. A session with no room actions (one you logged by hand, for example) shows its session details, notes, action items and feedback.

Views and Customize

The View buttons at the top of the board switch everything at once:

Click Customize to open a panel listing the widgets on the page from top to bottom:

• Untick a widget to hide it. Hidden widgets are listed below, grouped by topic; tick one to bring it back.
• Use the up and down arrows to move a widget.
• On a wide screen, switch a widget between half and full width.
• Reset to Default goes back to the Session Story view.

Your layout is saved in this browser as you change it, and it applies to every playtest session you open. Changing anything after picking a view makes it your own layout, and Your Layout shows beside the view buttons. Another browser or device starts from the Session Story view.

Session Story

The session at a glance: active play time, sittings, players who took an action, pace (actions per active minute), quiet stretches and the average rating, with a one-line summary and a Table DNA strip of what players spent their actions on.

• Active play adds up the time between actions that came less than 5 minutes apart.
• A break of 30 minutes or more starts a new sitting. A room left open for days is measured by the time people actually played, not by the days in between.
• A quiet stretch is 2 minutes or more with no action, inside a sitting.

Table Superlatives

Light-hearted awards, each one a real count: Most active (most actions), Card shark (most cards drawn), Rule scholar (most rulebook lookups), Dice hog (most dice rolls), Lucky roller (best average roll against a fair roll, with at least 10 rolls), Deep thinker (longest typical wait) and Shuffler in chief (most shuffles). An award only appears when one player is ahead of the next and past a small minimum, and only in a session with two or more players.

Seat Report

One row per player: actions and their share, bursts, typical and longest wait, cards drawn and played, dice rolls, rulebook lookups, take-backs, deck searches, dice luck, and when they first and last acted. Click a column heading to sort by it.

• A burst is a run of actions by one player before someone else acts.
• The room has no turn marker, so a wait is an estimate: the time from a player's last action to their next one while others were playing. A gap across a break between sittings is not a wait.
• Rulebook counts page turns of a rulebook on the table plus openings of one in the enlarged preview.
• A take-back is a card dragged out of a hand and dropped back, or returned to a hand.
• Dice luck is the player's average roll against a fair roll of the same die.

Game Result

How the game ended: each player's Turn order, their Score and whether they Won. The room has no turn marker and doesn't know who won, so you fill this one in yourself. Your project's Analytics tab turns the results into win rates by turn order.

• Until you save a result, the form is open, with one row for each player who took an action at the table (blank rows for a session logged by hand). Their turn order starts blank.
• Turn order from who acted first numbers the players in the order they first acted at the table. Players it can't find at the table go last. Check it before you save: setting up the table counts as acting.
• Add player adds a row, up to 12. Clear a row's name, or click its cross, to leave that player out.
• Scores are optional. Tick Won for every winner: a tie can have several, and a co-operative loss has none.
• Two players can't share a turn order.
• Save Result saves it. Afterwards Edit opens it again, with Clear result to remove it.

Session Heartbeat

Actions per minute across the session. Shaded bands are quiet stretches, diamonds are rulebook page turns, and dotted lines mark snapshots and action items. The time between sittings is left out, so each break shows as one dashed line.

Rulebook Hot Pages

For each rulebook, the pages players turned to on the table, most-turned first, with each page's picture and name and how often it was turned to. It also shows how many times the rulebook was opened in the enlarged preview, and who looked. A page everyone keeps returning to is a rule worth making clearer, or putting on a player aid.

Turning pages inside the enlarged preview is not recorded, so a preview opening counts once and does not say which pages were read.

Head-Scratch Meter

Signs players were unsure: rulebook lookups (page turns and preview openings, with how many per hour of play), quiet stretches and the longest one, deck searches and the time spent searching, take-backs, peeks (pieces opened in the enlarged preview), host undos (only the host can undo) and pieces deleted from the table. None of these proves confusion on its own; several together are worth a look.

Hot and Cold Cards

The cards drawn most (up to 12, with their deck), and for each deck the cards still inside it that were never drawn. "Never drawn" uses the session's table as it was last saved and checks each card's name against every draw.

Luck Meter

For each standard die rolled in the session:

• A fairness verdict from a chi-square test against equal odds for every face: Looks fair, A little streaky (a fair die lands this unevenly less than 1 time in 20), or Rolled unevenly (less than 1 time in 100). The test needs about 5 rolls per face; with fewer it says Not enough rolls yet.
• A bar per face against a dashed fair line, how often the highest and lowest faces came up, and each player's average against a fair roll.

Dice with your own face labels have no fair average to compare against, so they are left out.

Never Touched

For each kind of piece on the table (cards, decks, tokens, dice, counters, coins, spinners, bags, timers, rulebooks and other pieces), how many nobody moved, flipped, rolled or drew from, with their pictures. Boards, labels and zones are left out, because they are meant to stay put. It uses the session's table as it was last saved.

Table Heat Map

Where pieces were put down, drawn over the outlines of the boards, decks, bags and rulebooks on the table. Pick a player to see only their moves. A very long session shows an even sample of its moves.

Deck Life

For each deck: draws, shuffles, draws per shuffle, and deck searches with the time spent searching.

Counters Over Time

Every counter that changed at least twice (up to 12), by its name on the table, charted across the session.

Table DNA

A radar chart of what players spent their actions on: cards, dice, tokens, counters, zones, the rulebook and notes (markers, stickers and labels). Moving, turning and flipping pieces leads on any virtual table, so it is left off the chart and given as its own share.

The original sections

The page's original sections are all still widgets. The Classic view shows them in their original order.

Quick Stats

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 15 cards handled most (added, played, placed or moved), with images, counts, and how many distinct players handled each. Good for spotting power imbalances or cards everyone avoids.

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 of active play), total actions, and an engagement spread showing how evenly players participated.

Designer Insights

The Designer insights widget lists 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 of active play 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: with two or more ratings (1 to 10), an average of 8 or more reads as positive and under 6 as below average, and it points you to the comments.

Project Analytics

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

Trends Across Sessions

A line chart with one point per session, in date order. The buttons above it pick the measure:

• Rating: the average player rating, 1 to 10.
• Active play: minutes of play, not counting breaks of 5 minutes or more.
• Pace: actions per minute of active play.
• Players: players who took at least one action.
• Rule lookups: rulebook page turns plus openings in the enlarged preview, per hour of active play.
• Typical wait: how long a player usually waited while others played, before acting again. For a session it is the middle value of the players' own typical waits.
• Quiet stretches: gaps of 2 minutes or more inside a sitting where nobody played.
• Take-backs: cards dragged out of a hand and dropped back, or returned to a hand.

These are the same measures as a session page's Session Story, Seat Report and Head-Scratch Meter. A measure only gets a button once a session has a value for it. Click a point to open that session.

Then vs Now

Pick two sessions to see every measure side by side, with the change between them. It starts on the earliest and latest sessions it can compare. A change is green when it moved the better way and red when it moved the worse way: a higher rating is better, and fewer rule lookups, shorter waits, fewer quiet stretches and fewer take-backs are better. Active play, pace and players are left uncolored, because which way is better depends on your game.

Returning Testers

People with an account who took a seat in two or more of your sessions, how many sessions each played and links to those sessions. Each is shown under the name they last played as. Guests can't be recognized from one session to the next, and you and your co-owners aren't counted.

Cards, Decks and Dice

• 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.

Who Wins

Built from the Game Result you enter on each session page. A game counts when it has two or more players and at least one winner.

• The table shows, for each place in the turn order, how many games had that place, how many it won, its win rate and its fair share: what that place would win if going first, second or last made no difference. In a game with a tie, every winner counts as a win, so a place's fair share is that game's winners divided by its players, averaged over the games. A win rate 15 points or more away from its fair share is highlighted.
• A game is only in the table when every player has a turn order, numbered from 1st with none skipped. A note says how many games with a winner were left out for that reason.
• Below it, how many games the first player won against their fair share. From five games on, it also says how often luck alone would land that far from fair.
• Typical winning margin is the middle value of the winner's score minus the best other score, from games with one winner, where the winner and at least one other player have a score.

Cross-Session Insights

Observations drawn from the whole history, for example ratings trending up or down, or a deck that dominates the draws. Rule lookups and typical wait are compared too: from sessions with at least 10 minutes of active play, once there are four or more, the earlier half against the later half. A change of a quarter or more either way says Rules are getting clearer or Players are reaching for the rules more, and Shorter waits between turns or Longer waits between turns.

Once five or more games have a full turn order, Going first may be an advantage or Going first may be a disadvantage appears when the first player's wins are so far from their fair share that luck alone would do it 1 time in 20 or less.

Which Sessions Count

The tab only appears once you have recorded sessions with logged actions. For large histories it aggregates recent sessions first and warms up older ones in the background; an amber dot on the tab means it is still working through them.

The trend measures other than rating and players come from a session's room history. A session whose room no longer holds all of its actions keeps the totals it was first analyzed with rather than measuring a fragment: it shows its rating and player count only, and is left out of Then vs Now. A session you logged by hand has no logged actions, so it isn't part of the trends, but its game result still counts in Who Wins.

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.

Click Thanks on a response to thank the tester who wrote it. It is one tap, with no message, and each response can be thanked once. If they left it while signed in (and did not tick Anonymous), they get an email from you, and it counts toward their Helpful Tester accolade.

You don't have to keep checking. When testers submit feedback in a room or on your game's public feedback form, the project's owners get an email. Responses that arrive close together are collected into one email, sent 10 minutes after the first, saying how many came in and, when they were rated, their average rating. Feedback you fill in yourself, or add to a session by hand, does not send one. To stop these emails, turn off Feedback on your games under Email Notifications on your Profile page, or use the Unsubscribe link in one.

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 use the up and down arrows to reorder them.
• Mark a question Required to prevent submitting without it.
• Use Reset to Default Template 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.
• Export JSON: 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.