I don't know how the pros do a whole convention - I spent one day at PAX Unplugged, only half of which was in "designer" mode and the other half as general audience, and felt completely wiped out after that. Maybe I'm just old and out of shape (which is a stereotype that definitely does not apply to game industry professionals, right?).
But if you're here at all, it's presumably to read about games, not to read my personal kvetching. So yeah, I did spend half the day in the Unpub room where I got to test out DGE with a bunch of different groups, 3-6 players at a time. People were clearly enjoying it, and I got a request for a Spanish translation (publishers take note, that's international demand for this game!). Some of the highlights for me were using a steam powered accordion to make you a better fighter (because it's a cardio workout), using a reverberating brick to convince humans that you can turn straw into old (because nothing does the job like brain damage), and many enjoyable arguments about an invention following the exact phrasing of the patron's request and any consequences outside of that being irrelevant.
In terms of game feedback, one suggestion that came up early on, and which I implemented for the rest of the day, was that whoever won the last round should go first to reveal and explain their invention in the current round. I don't know how important it actually is, though an argument could be made for slight advantages based on whether you speak before or after everyone else, but in any case it worked well enough and no one objected to it. Besides that, there were two things that people brought up most frequently and which I will definitely be working into the game. One was to put colors or icons or something on the front of the cards to make it easier to remember which deck they are from (I quickly saw the value of this after multiple rounds of organizing the discard piles and then shuffling them back into the right deck for the next game), and to add some kind of rule to let players change out some or all of their cards if they don't like anything in their hand. I gave it some thought over the course of the day and eventually came up with: before playing an invention, you may discard all of your Base and Mod cards. Draw the first Base and Mod cards from their respective decks and automatically play that as your invention. At the end of the round, draw three of each so you have a full hand like normal. I didn't think of it in time to actually test it out, but I did mention the idea at the end of the last game that I ran, and one of the players described it as "when you forgot to work on the project and suddenly realize it's due tomorrow," which I love. So that's definitely going into the next iteration of the game.
I also talked with a couple of publishers and got as far as "they acknowledge my existence," which is a step in the right direction for me. No exciting news yet, but who knows what the next 2d12 months might bring?
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