playtest failure

The entire design of the board game portion of my project did not work design wise.  It took a lot of time away from em, and ended up in needing a complete redesign.  How I handled the testing was I sent pdf's to players of the board, and used the email account to track the player movements.  the original design had the players competing against each other as well as against the game itself.  However it was obvious early on who would win, if any players won.  Players focused more on the competition aspect making the over all experience with them unpleasant.  I tried to keep this aspect, but then when a player seemed like the were going to lose, the players Sore Loser personality took over, making it so they would refuse to talk to anyone, or take their turn.  This also made the overall testing slower than necessary.  It was clear that there wasn't enough incentive for them to work together, and to many people were okay with the "If I don't win, then no one will" concept.