Our group’s game is called Anarchy! in which “hidden rules” is a major component that adds to the premise and the fun of our game. I played a party game called Scissors in which the premise and the theme of the game is surrounding the “hidden rules” which I think is a great comparison to our game.
The theme of this game is social inductive logic. The mechanics of the game goes as follows: the rules of the game are really simple: in a group of 3-8 people, sit around in a circle and prepare one pair of scissors for the game. There has to be at least 1 person who knows the rule of the game, and that person will be the leader. The leader will start the game by saying “I receive the scissors (either open or closed) and I pass them (either open or closed)”. Other players will continue the game by doing the same thing. The leader will announce whether the player said each part of the sentence correctly or not. The game will end when all players have caught up on the trick and can successfully pass around the scissors and say the correct statement. The hidden rule here is that it’s whether the player’s legs are crossed or uncrossed that determines whether the scissors should be crossed (open) or uncrossed (closed).
The kind of fun that this game primarily has is discovery and fellowship. Scissors create a sense of discovery since there are a set of hidden rules that only the leader (or maybe a few other people – but most likely only the leader) know about.
Since the mechanics of this game is so simple, there isn’t any concrete graphic design decisions involved since all we need is just one single pair of scissors. However, the physical arrangement can be seen as one potential graphic decision since players are required to sit in a circle which reinforces both the theme and the fun. Sitting in a circle reinforces the theme since you have to use trial-and-error to figure out the hidden rules which in turn also reinforces discovery, one type of fun. It also strengthens the other type fun, fellowship, because sitting in a circle reinforces the social and interactive aspect of it since everyone is facing everyone.
Comparison to game: similar to Anarchy!, all players are sitting in a circle so everyone can see all player’s actions to try and figure out the hidden rules. I think this physical arrangement of players is essential for most social deduction games. However, since scissors’s hidden rules are set, you can’t really play the game over and over with the same group of people whereas for Anarchy!, the hidden rules are set by the players so there will be new hidden rules each round. But this, in turn, makes scissors much easier to understand and get a hang of it while Anarchy! can take much longer to explain and requires more moderation. This being said, both games do require a moderator/leader kind of role which might take the fun out of the moderator/leader since they won’t have to discover the hidden rules. With this, Scissors can do better since there is no check-and-balance system to keep the leader in check when he/she made a mistake whereas for Anarchy!, we did place a double-penalty on moderators which makes the game more, if not equally, challenging for the moderators who already know all the rules.
