You've decided to playtest your FTUE — the first session a new player has with your game. Maybe retention looks soft in the first few minutes. Maybe a launch is coming and nobody wants to find out about a broken tutorial from launch-day reviews. Maybe a stakeholder asked why players are leaving at the tutorial, and nobody had a confident answer.

Most first-time studies don't fail because the session went badly. They fail earlier — before recruitment, before task design — because nobody agreed on the one question the study needed to answer. Get that part right and everything downstream gets easier.

This guide walks a first-time team through a real FTUE playtest, in order: when playtesting is the right tool, how to scope a one-sentence objective, who to recruit and how many, how to design sessions that reveal behaviour instead of opinions, moderated versus unmoderated trade-offs, how to tell a real pattern from noise — including the difference between a player who's confused and one who's genuinely challenged — and how to turn what you saw into a brief your team can act on.

Includes a common-mistakes list, a ten-day example workflow, and a 12-point checklist to run before you recruit a single participant.

Free to download. No research background required.