Artist’s statement

In “Writer’s Block,” we invite players into a whimsical world where creativity meets intrigue. Inspired by the thrill of social deduction and a love for stories and how we tell them, this game combines the power of imagination with the art of deception.

At its core, “Writer’s Block” is about crafting narratives together, weaving a few words at a time together to create a tale that all who play can be captivated by. Players take on the roles of writers, each contributing a bit of information to the shared story. With every sentence, they work toward constructing a complete story, navigating the twists and turns of a beginning, middle, and end.

Yet, hidden among the writers are spies whose sole purpose is to complete a mission that may disrupt the narrative. As players write, they must also pay attention to their fellow storytellers, watching for subtle clues.

Writers play through six rounds, every two representing a phase of the story. With missions that range from references to wordplay, spies need to strategize to fulfill their objectives without revealing their true roles.

“Writer’s Block” is more than an exercise in storytelling or even just a game; it’s an engaging shared experience of creativity and collaboration. Whether crafting the perfect happy ending or discovering the secrets that spies attempt to conceal, players are immersed in a world where their decisions shape the outcome.

Concept map

When deciding on our game, there were many potential options we could have chosen. From our time brainstorming, we came up with many avenues for games, including a game where players create prompts to ask each other and a game where your success or failure in rock, paper, scissors determines if you can place a piece on a tic-tac-toe board.

However, we decided to create a storytelling game where players could create a story a few words at a time while spies had to carry out missions. This was later more fleshed out and re-balanced to become “Writer’s Block”, with some of the differences between the initial concept and the final product visible below.

As for the final version of “Writer’s Block,” our concept map for the mechanics involved in play can be found below:

Initial decisions about formal elements and values

When we were first brainstorming our game, we wanted to think of ideas which had a central theme centered around social deduction, creative expression and storytelling. For social deduction, we pulled inspiration from common “Out the spy” games such as Among Us or Mafia. Specifically for our game, we wanted players to have to identify spies based on their actions, while still progressing towards their own goals. We also wanted to incorporate aspects of collaboration and teamwork, allowing players to work together to build something. With this in mind, we came up with several initial designs for our game. In the earliest stages, we experimented with players acting as different roles or stories and having other players try to guess. For instance, someone might play the role of the roundabout on campus and they would give clues such as “Don’t bike the wrong way” or “It’s always crowded right when you need to get somewhere on time”. Although we liked the aspects of people connecting through shared experiences, we wanted to focus on the collaborative aspects but make it more open-ended with opportunities for self expression. Thus, we transitioned from verbal role-playing into story writing, where players would be able to exercise more creative freedom and express themselves in a more concrete way. Furthermore, we thought this would enhance the collaboration between players by allowing them to visualize how the story builds up piece by piece through each writer’s contribution.

When thinking about how to emphasize the “story-telling” feature of our game, we decided to experiment with a “fairy-tale” theme. Many of our initial story-prompts were about commonly known fairy tales, like “Rapunzel” or “Hansel and Gretel”. We thought this would make it easier for players to think of what to write, since they would likely be familiar with these stories. However, we ended up changing this idea after playtesting, which we go into more detail about below. In addition, we wanted the missions to be difficult enough but still interesting. We decided to add variety in the kinds of missions, brainstorming both “word-based” and “action-based” missions so players would not only have to pay attention to the story sentences, but would also have to watch each player carefully on their turn. We thought this could also increase social interaction between players, since players would have to observe and point out each other’s actions or movements. However, we also ended up revising this idea after feedback from our playtests.

Initial brainstorming of some of our story and mission cards

Testing and iteration history

First Playtest

For our first playtest, our aim was to observe whether the difficulty level of the game was balanced between spies; in particular, we were looking for whether the missions were too hard/easy to guess for the writers, and also whether they were too hard/easy to carry out for the spies. Furthermore, we wanted to see whether our story prompts were engaging to write about. We had around 10 players in our first playtest with simple “Story theme” and “Role” cards written on paper. We quickly realized that 10 players was too much for our game, because we were only able to get through one round and weren’t able to see how the game would play out across 6 rounds. For future playtests, we decided to limit our range to 5-8 players. In general, players seemed to follow the rules of the game quite well after we explained them. The missions the spies pulled were: “Only write words/phrases that end in the letter ‘s’” and “Use a name in your word/phrase”, and the story theme was “Hansel and Gretel”. We noticed several key observations during the game and during the post-game feedback session.

For one, players felt like some of the missions were too vague to be able to guess. For instance, one of the spies’ missions was “only write words/phrases that end in the letter ‘s’”, which many players expressed would have been difficult for them to guess if they didn’t know that rule existed. Another piece of feedback we took into consideration was that missions could be more exciting. Guessing specific grammar or letter rules is difficult and not as engaging for players. However, they liked the mix of having missions related to the sentence as well as missions related to physical action, like tapping the table. In addition, there was feedback related to our story cards. Players mentioned that it could be fun to make the story themes more of a general prompt, such as “write a superhero story”, instead of making players stick to a specific fairy tale. This would also prevent players from having to continually look back at the story card to see what the summary says, especially for players unfamiliar with certain fairy tales. We took this feedback into consideration when redesigning our prototype for our second playtest.

Story, player, and mission cards from our first playtest

Resulting player sentence from our first playtest

Second Playtest

For our second playtest, we wanted to test the revisions we made following the first playtest. We added new story cards that were more general but still felt entertaining, like “write a superhero story” and “write a story about a prince and a friend who betrays him”, to see whether this would be more engaging for players. We also wanted to test one of our action-based missions, so we made one of the spies do the “Tap the table twice before writing your word/phrase” mission; the other mission they pulled was “Use a name in your word/phrase”. There were 5 players in this playtest, and they were able to get through 2 rounds, which meant that we were able to observe a voting session play out. They successfully voted out one spy and guessed their mission, which was the “Use a name in your word/phrase” mission. From this playtest, we observed and gathered helpful feedback on the initial questions we were looking to answer, and gained new insights as well.

In this playtest, we observed that players were much more creative and playful with the direction of their sentences because they weren’t as restricted by the story prompt. This led to more humor and interaction between players, which we felt was a positive change. However, they found the missions to be quite difficult to guess, and also felt like the missions should focus more on the words themselves instead of being action-based. This was in contrast to our first playtest, where players liked the idea of the action-based missions. For our final playtest, we noted this observation as something to keep in mind when gathering feedback.

Player sentences from our second playtest.

Final playtest

For our final playtest, we were mainly focused on observing whether players could figure out the rules of the game and start playing with just the rule sheet provided. Although they understood most of the structure and mechanics of the game, a couple of questions came up which we had to answer. This indicated that we needed to be more specific with some rules, as well as provide clear mission examples so players have an idea of what to look for. We had 6 players and they were able to get through 4 rounds, so 2 voting rounds. They were able to identify one of the spies, but weren’t able to guess the missions. From this, we gathered observations and feedback that helped inform our final iterations.

This group also indicated that the action-based missions didn’t seem totally relevant to the game. Since this was similar to what the previous playtesters mentioned, we decided to revise our missions. We instead decided to go with “word”-based and “reference”-based missions, which are both related to what the spies write. Reference missions require spies to mention a word from a certain category, whereas Word missions are more related to letter rules or specific word requirements. We categorized them in this way to keep all the missions word-based while still building in variety. We also thought that categorizing the missions in this way would make it easier for players to deduce the missions. In our final playtest, several players mentioned that it would be helpful to have more specific categories of what the spies can do, since it felt difficult to know where to start guessing. We also clarified some of the confusion that came up in our rules sheet, such as specifying that there needs to be only one story card for the whole group, rather than each player pulling a story card.