The game our team wants to design is called “Rumors”, a social deduction game for 4–10 players. At the start of the game, each player secretly selects one player they love and another they hate. Over a series of rounds, players take turns either spreading rumors (in the standardized format “Player A loves/hates Player B”) or confirming one relationship fact with the moderator. At the end of the game, everyone submits their guesses and adds up their points: every correct guess of a relationship earns 2 points, every correct guess made by the person one loves earns 1 additional point, and every correct guess made by the person one hates causes a loss of 1 point. The player with the most points wins.
In this game, every player is their own team. You want the player you love to gain more points while sabotaging the player you hate, without knowing whether they feel the same way about you. With limited opportunities to verify the truth, players must strategically spread, interpret, and track rumors to deduce the full network of hidden relationships. This game involves logical thinking and bluffing, inviting players to mislead others while trying to read their moves. It evokes several types of fun/aesthetics, including challenge, fellowship, expression, and potentially narrative.
I chose to compare Rumors with Mafia, one of the most popular and classic social deduction games. Mafia was created by Dimitry Davidoff. Its target audience includes teenagers and adults. While it is traditionally played in person as a party game, many online versions are also available today.
Although both Rumors and Mafia are party games that involve multiple players, their interaction patterns differ. Rumors is a “multilateral competition” in which every player is their own team, while Mafia is a “team vs. team” game where players are divided into two teams: the Mafia and the Villagers. Yet, both games share the same core objective: to outwit and find the solution.
In Mafia, the two teams operate with asymmetric information. The mafia members know who is on their team and who is not. The villagers do not. Some villagers with special abilities, such as doctors or detectives, are able to use those abilities to act or gather clues, but to really help their team to win, they must first convince others to trust them. This is where the mafia could camouflage themselves by spreading misinformation and mislead others, taking advantage of the imbalance in knowledge and power. In contrast, Rumors gives every player an equal role. Each player ought to be the “mafia” to spread misleading information as well as the “villager” to uncover the truth. There are no pre-assigned teams, everyone must rely on logic, observation, and interpretation to navigate the social web.
I think what makes Rumors a “better” or “worse” game than Mafia for certain types of people lies in this balance of power. For those who enjoy being on equal footing or dislike playing the passive “useless villager” role, Rumors may feel like a clever and refreshing alternative. On the other hand, it may impose too much stress on players who prefer lighter party games or who simply want to socialize without engaging in intense deduction.
Another key difference between the two is that players are not eliminated in the middle of the game in Rumors. Every player remains active from start to finish. Even if a player does not receive any rumors, this fact itself tells you (and everyone else) something about the social network. Meanwhile, players who receive more rumors are not necessarily advantaged because rumors very likely contain conflicting or misleading information. Sometimes, having less noise helps you see the full picture more clearly.
After revisiting the experience of playing Mafia, I believe a compelling narrative could further enhance player experience in Rumors. We could design custom background contexts, such as high schoolers in a classroom setting, bosses and interns in an office environment, strangers who happen to travel together, etc. These settings could create familiar/uncommon emotions for the assigned relationships, enriching the game’s immersive experience.
