My team is developing AMIGO, a vulnerability-based card game designed to turn strangers into friends fast. In AMIGO, each players starts with seven cards that can include a mixture of question cards and action cards. Instead of traditional UNO numbers, the question cards contain prompts like “What’s a lie you’ve told in a relationship?” or “What’s something you secretly wish someone would fight for you about?”. Action cards include skip, reverse, and add detail, which all serve as a get-out-of-jail free and pushes the question on to the next person. If you don’t have an action card, you either answer the question or draw three cards. The goal is to be the first to run out of cards, similar to UNO.
For this critical play, I decided to play Hot Seat with three close friends. I was impressed by how the game explores similar themes of social interaction, but with a completely different approach than what my team and I had developed for AMIGO. While we ask players to reveal their true selves through deeper questions, Hot Seat invites players to impersonate someone else’s voice. Each round centers on one player, who then draws a prompt like, “What would I do for $100 that no one else in the room would do for $1000?”. Each player then writes an answer from the perspective of the player in the hot seat, then the answers are read aloud for all players to guess which was the real one. The goal of the game is to trick the other players into thinking your fake answer came from the hot seat player, or guess correctly if you’re not the one bluffing.
Unlike AMIGO, the tension in Hot Seat comes from impersonation. It’s less about how you see yourself and more about you others see you. In my play experience with my three friends, there were plenty of times where the “fake” answers were much more telling than the real ones, deceiving everyone into thinking it was truly the real answer.
The anonymity of Hot Seat lets shy players contribute freely, while the guessing mechanic adds enough gamification to avoid it feeling too vulnerable. This was an interesting element to compare to AMIGO, as those who play tested our game mentioned that the game, at times, felt too vulnerable too fast. However, the limitation of Hot Seat became apparent as we played more and more rounds— even though some questions had a deeper connotation, all players were forced to think of funny, on-the-nose answers that would earn votes from the other players. Because of this, Hot Seat felt like it toyed with the depth, while AMIGO feels like it addresses depth head-on (maybe too much so).
One thing I would improve in Hot Seat is to add some element of reflection that adds to the gamification. While the rounds are quick, fun, and often filled with surprises, there is little room in gameplay to touch on what answers were said and why. I feel like this is an important element to the game’s social dynamic that is overlooked, as players’ answers are revealing of their perception of the player in the hot seat. An example of this could be ranking answers from “realest” to “fakest”, or including more real answers to encourage more discussion.
From an MDA perspective, Hot Seat’s mechanics are anonymous prompts and guessing, its dynamics center on deception, impersonation, and surprise, and its aesthetics are social fun, laughter, and “gotcha” moments. When compared to AMIGO, our mechanics implement direct prompts and action cards, dynamics rely on emotional trade-offs, and the aesthetics are intimacy and tension.
