The game I played is Who’s the Undercover (谁是卧底), which is a popular party game widespread in China primarily through its frequent inclusion in the variety show Happy Camp (快乐大本营), produced by Hunan Broadcasting System. In this show, celebrity guests often participated in the game, showcasing its engaging mechanics to a broad television audience. The platform is quit flexible. It can be played physically with cards or digitally via mobile apps. The target audience is casual players aged 10+, typically in social settings such as parties or game nights. It emphasizes bluffing, deduction, and light-hearted communication.
While Who’s the Undercover succeeds as a lightweight social deduction game based on linguistic similarity and bluffing, we felt it lacked replayability and long-term strategic depth. The game’s core mechanic involves assigning similar but different words to players and having them give vague clues to identify the outlier, followed by group voting to eliminate the suspected spy. It generates quick dynamics of guesswork and bluffing, but these become repetitive over time. The lack of asymmetric roles, evolving tension, or post-elimination engagement often led players to lose interest after a few rounds. When I played with my friends, during our playtest of this game, the first few rounds were exciting and full of lively discussion. But as we played more rounds, the excitement began to fade. Every round followed the same loop — receive a word, describe it vaguely, vote, and eliminate someone. Once a player was eliminated, they had no further role in the game, which led to people disengaging and checking out of the experience. One of my friends even commented that it felt like they were just waiting for the next round to start. This repetitiveness and lack of post-elimination involvement revealed a major design limitation: while the game is simple and fun at first, it doesn’t offer much strategic depth or variation to sustain interest over multiple rounds.
This gave us the motivation to design our game — Code War. It preserves the fun and simplicity of verbal clue-giving but adds more roles to enhance strategic depth and narrative immersion. One major design goal was to introduce a variety of roles, such as Observer, Avenger, and Civilian, each contributing to different decision-making pressures and team dynamics. The role design was inspired by Werewolf but repurposed to support a different kind of gameplay. Unlike Werewolf, which focuses on behavioral tells and open accusations, Code War emphasizes linguistic deduction and subtle strategy through evolving role dynamics. These roles enhance both strategic depth and aesthetic variation, ensuring that players experience new challenges and emotions in each round depending on their role and the evolving group state. For example, the Observer creates early-game tension by silently gaining information, which influences voting strategy. The Avenger adds high-stakes consequences to elimination, forcing players to consider retaliation risks before voting. The Civilian’s lack of a word creates an extra layer of uncertainty, requiring them to bluff convincingly while staying aligned with the majority. These variations create different play experiences from round to round, supporting aesthetics like surprise, suspense, and empowerment.
In addition, we designed the Ghost mechanic to address a major shortcoming in Who’s the Undercover, which is that once a player is eliminated, they no longer participate in the game. In Code War, Ghosts vote on the speaking order in each new round, keeping them engaged and giving them a subtle but meaningful influence on the game’s flow. This change supports stronger Fellowship and maintains player investment throughout the session. It enhances the Procedures and Player Interaction Patterns, keeping all players active and attentive even after elimination.
Ethically, both games involve deception and social manipulation. However, because Code War builds narrative justification, you’ve lost your memory, you’re unsure who to trust, and it contextualizes deception as part of roleplay rather than manipulation. This subtle framing helps players feel more comfortable lying or misdirecting, as it serves the dramatic premise. It also challenges players to grapple with incomplete information, not just others’ deception, creating a more empathetic dynamic.
In conclusion, Code War reimagines the basic mechanics of word comparison by separating word and role cards and layering strategic uncertainty through asymmetric roles. The resulting dynamics include deeper suspicion, shifting alliances, and unexpected reversals, while the aesthetic is one of Narrative, Discovery, and Fellowship. In short, Code War builds on the charm of Who’s the Undercover but evolves it into a more emotionally resonant and strategically satisfying experience.
