Koreen Odiney’s We’re Not Really Strangers helps players achieve an emotional connection with each other by giving players a tightly scripted routine for disclosing vulnerable thoughts and feelings to the group. It’s a neat example of how games create a “magic circle” where the norms of the real world are suspended.
The mechanics of We’re Not Really Strangers are boldly simple. The game comes with three decks of prompt cards, each representing a level of increasing vulnerability: “Perception”, “Connection” and “Reflection.” The prompt cards are intended to invoke conversations about players’ vulnerable thoughts: e.g. “What do I seem like I would splurge on?” or “How are you really doing?” The game is essentially comprised of players taking turns asking a prompt card to the group and getting a response. Each turn, a player draws a card from the current deck and reads the prompt aloud to the table, and each member of the group answers. After a set number of turns (the rules suggest 15), the group switches to the next deck, delving into deeper prompts. After all three rounds, the game ends.
WNRS is boldly simple. This image shows all the unique artifacts of the game.
WNRS also offers some extra bells and whistles in the form of “Dig Deeper” cards (which players can use once per game to ask another player to elaborate on an answer) and the “Final Card” (which ends the game with each player writing a secret note to one another to read after they’ve parted ways). Functionally, these don’t seem necessary to the game—in fact, I played without them—but I do see how having more artifical mechanics helps the game create the sense of being a “magic circle.”
It’s because of these unnecessary obstacles that WNRS works; in the “magic circle” there’s no embarrassment or shame when answering prompt cards, “We’re just playing a game! Look, it has cards!”
In other words, without these extra game-y mechanics, the game feels a little too close to just talking which breaks the whole purpose of WNRS, which is to let players be vulnerable with each other under the guise that they’re “just playing a game.” WNRS, then, is an interesting case study into just how well games are characterized by Bernard Suit’s quote “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” Without the obstacles of the rounds, the turns, and the peripheral special effect cards, the gameplay of WNRS betrays itself as just a vulnerable conversation. It’s because of these unnecessary obstacles that WNRS works; in the “magic circle” there’s no embarrassment or shame when answering prompt cards, “We’re just playing a game! Look, it has cards!”
WNRS isn’t extremely unique among the class of “getting vulnerable” games (a quick Google search reveals a dozen similarly structured conversation-based card games), though it does have perhaps the best marketing. Its ultra-minimalist graphic design likely appeals to a young-adult target audience, and accordingly, its success has been due in large part to a tour of TikTok and social media virality.
WNRS is hardly alone in the class of games designed to help you reveal intimate secrets to people you just met.
It might look the best on TikTok, though.
One difference between WNRS and its competitors is that it falls more on the more serious side, which works both to its benefit and detriment. On one hand, it achieves deep emotional connection than, say, Truth or Dare, a game in which players can cheat out of being really vulnerable since they make up the prompts themselves. On the other, WNRS isn’t really the kind of game you can play with strangers at a party in the same way you can play, say, Hot Seat. I’m reminded of Daniel Cook’s GDC talk on Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships; you can’t jump all the way into the deep end of intimate disclosure without warming up to it, or you risk oversharing, trauma dumping, and shame. You need to get pretty vulnerable to play WNRS, so I’d say its a good game to play for people who are already at least lukewarm friends.
If we can make players say or do anything under the guise of playing a game, we must be acutely aware of what the game might prompt them to do.
Perhaps this risk of invoking “oversharing” situations is something to be redesigned in WNRS. WNRS has the power to make people share vulnerably, but it must wield this power carefully; as it stands, it does nothing to ameliorate the risk of people getting caught up in the game sharing more than they’d rationally be comfortable with. A simple solution is formally introducing a “passing” mechanic where players can skip a prompt if the answer is too revealing (perhaps a limited number of times). As a designer, WNRS has taught me about the responsibility that comes with creating an environment where the rules of the real world are broken: if we can make players say or do anything under the guise of playing a game, we must be acutely aware of what the game might prompt them to do.
