Target Audience: Social deduction game fans, casual party game players, groups aged 13+ Name of the Game: Spy
Game’s Creator: Alexandr Ushan
Platform: Physical card game, also available in browser-based online versions and mobile versions
Spyfall and Odd 2 Out thrive on social deception/lying and having impostors vs non-impostors. While Spyfall challenges one player to identify the place from contextual clues without knowing anything, Odd 2 Out does this by tasking imposters with giving them a misleading prompt and then having to blend in. These differences both create tension and offer a close bonding experience by encouraging discussions. Through playing Spyfall, I realized the importance of player dynamics and the number of players in a game.
Spyfall’s core mechanic is hidden information: all players receive a shared location and role, except for the spy, who receives no information. This simple mechanic generates dynamics of suspicion, deduction, and bluffing, which lead to tension and deception. Each round starts with all players having a location (“Circus” or “Bar”) except for one person who is a spy and receives no information except the fact that they’re a spy. The spy’s mission is to figure out a location based on questions and answers from other players, such as “Do you go to this location a lot?”, “What do you wear to this location?”. The non-spies in this game would try to subtly verify who the spy is while avoiding giving away too much. I played the game via the mobile app, where it shows the prompt on the phone as you click on it. I played the game twice, once with a big group (8 people) and once with a small group (4 people). Compared to our game, our game gives out clear prompts to both imposters and non-imposters, while for Spyfall, imposters receive nothing, and others receive the location and their roles.
I found that this dynamic works well in bigger groups. The first time I played the game was on my friend’s phone with a group of 8 people. At first, we were confused about the game, me especially, since I wasn’t paying attention to the instructions, and when it’s my turn to flip the card, I just got the word: “Airport” and “Pilot”. However, I feel like the game is very intuitive to catch on to. After observing people questioning one another, I finally caught up on the game and the rhythm. After that, we had a lot of fun, especially with getting creative with the questioning and our backstory with our characters. When I was the impostor, I also found that it was fun to pay attention to everything and figure out what the location was. From a formal element standpoint, the usage of roles was very powerful, I found that we have more fruitful discussions compared to when we played games such as Mafia because of the backstories of our characters. We would ask questions based on what the game suggested, such as: “How often do you go to this place?”, “What do you do here?” but things also got more creative, like when we would ask: “Would you wear heels to this place?” when we got a sports field. The second time I played this game, however, I found that with a group of 4, while the confusion existed at first too, the other finding was that it just wasn’t as fun. I remember my friend saying after she was caught as the impostor: “So what was I supposed to lie about?”. With a small group, we were able to figure out who the imposter is very quickly, which took the fun out of the questioning and the deception. While it worked well in a big group, in contrast, with only 4 players, the mechanics failed to support sustained doubt. The spy was quickly found, and the round felt anticlimactic. This reflects an important lesson for our own game design: player count significantly affects game dynamics. Our game needs a certain level of player ambiguity to maintain that tension. This means we will need to test it in both small and large groups, and also test the number of imposters per group to tune the experience.
Spyfall made me think about role-based questioning, and limited information can encourage interactive play. Odd 2 Out applies a similar strategy but shifts from questioning to writing prompts creatively. In our own game, Odd 2 Out, we rely on textual prompt writing instead of verbal questioning. This mechanic lowers the barrier for introverted or less confident players, as the bluffing happens in writing. The dynamic becomes less about live interrogation and more about inference and interpretation. From a design perspective, Spyfall succeeds in creating a dynamic conversation loop where each answer becomes a clue for both the spy and the other players. In our game, we hope to create that same loop through prompt design, which allows imposters to give answers that are close enough to cause doubt, but different enough to stand out, which can be a hard balance to strike.
Ethically, these games make me think about deception and how it can normalize the behaviors among us. If we think that deception is fun in these games, then how do we navigate that dynamic in real life? In addition, in our prompt design, I want us to think about designing prompts that are funny but don’t make our players uncomfortable (again hard line to navigate, since humor is so personal). Unlike Spyfall, where players just have to rely on a somewhat neutral prompt, for our game, we have to balance that with personal boundaries and create prompts that respect them.
Spyfall revealed to me how, at the end of the day, how fun a simple game can be if they can successfully encourage discussion and camaraderie, which I hope we can successfully incorporate into our game.
