The Result: A Total Fiasco.
First the good news. Everyone found the game very interesting, with lots of real new and innovative concepts. Then the loads of bad news. DealStreet in its current form is simply too long and complicated. It took us a whole 45 minutes to explain the rules of the games. Even after that people did not understand all the rules and needed to be prompted at later stages. In the next 4 hours we played just 8 turns (33% of the game) when 4 people were playing the game, two of whom were game designers. The good thing is that we got a good 2 hours worth of feedback from our players which we absolutely need to incorporate, to get our game down to 3 hours so that 6 people can play at IIM Bangalore.
Lastly: we learnt the hard way that there is a world of difference between real-life testing and making assumptions on how people would react. And its time to get back to the drawing board as we are going to need to slog our buts off to reach the deadline of IIM Bangalore in less then 2 weeks.