This week, I played the game Coup, a social deduction game created by Rikki Tahta and published in 2012 by Indie Boards & Cards and La Meme Games. This game was recommended by our CA Nancy. I found that Plus Ones, our team’s game, and Coup share elements of social deduction. However, Plus Ones will have a greater focus on roles, furthering the aesthetics of narrative and creativity.
Coup begins by randomly assigning all players two face-down role cards. Each round, every player goes in a circle performing an action, such as collecting coins, assassinating a different player, or a special action allowed by their role. Once a player’s roles are both exhausted, either by assassinations or by losing challenges, that player loses the game. The last player standing with at least one role is the winner. If a player A attempts to play a special action that requires a certain role card, this player can be challenged by another player B. If player A does indeed have the required role card, then player B loses a card (a life). Otherwise, if player A does not have the card, then B loses a card. These game mechanics allow for fellowship to be the core mechanic, and to encourage deception, a common dynamic of social deduction games.
In Plus Ones, our team also hopes to incorporate an element of social deduction, and share with Coup this core aesthetic of fellowship. This will be accomplished through players having “secret goals” that, if guessed correctly by other players, causes them to lose points. We want to create a dynamic in which the goals will sometimes come into conflict with one another, causing players to butt heads when their goals don’t align.
One way we want our own game to contrast with Coup is to further the extent of role-playing. The roles in Coup, while characteristic of the actions players can take, are not embodied or publicly disclosed. There is no explicit mechanic involved for players to act differently or perform as their characters. In fact, it is normally against a players’ interest to honestly disclose their role, which I found out early in my gameplay, when disclosing my role allowed others to take advantage of it and caused me to lose quickly. However, in Plus Ones, players’ assigned roles will dictate their actions, behavior, and interactions with other players. Roles will be at the heart of the game, so a core aesthetic or type of fun will be creativity, since players will have the agency and liberty to embody their roles however they see fit – creating elaborate backstories, adding props, and leaning into archetypes of roles are all potential ways players can make their roles feel real. This will be explicitly outlined in the game mechanics, so players can lean in to aesthetics of creativity.
Players will also use the unique interactions of their roles and goals to co-create new narratives. A pitfall of Coup that I noticed during my critical play is repetitiveness. Rounds would start to feel slightly repetitive, since sometimes I would be assigned the same roles. Other players would act similarly from round to round, with some players often lying and others nearly always telling the truth. For example, one of the people I was playing with always said they were the Ambassador role, which allowed them to look at the center cards and change out their roles. Additionally, player relationships outside the game or from previous rounds would impact peoples’ behavior, blurring the magic circle of the game. One player I played with always killed the same person first, whenever possible, since they were (jokingly) feuding. Because Plus Ones will have unique permutations of player roles, goals, and events, these will make our game replayable, making it feel fresh each time it’s played, and lending itself to new opportunities for narrative and creativity.
The mechanics of Coup create an aesthetic of fellowship, encouraging deception and deceit. Plus Ones will borrow this aesthetic from Coup, with a greater focus on roles, co-creation of a narrative, and player creativity, in order to build a more replayable and responsive game.
