If you were to combine the Impress-the-Judge pattern of Apples to Apples with the laughter and expressiveness of games like Quiplash, you would get Wing It. This “Game of Extreme Storytelling” was created by Flying Leap Games, who claim it is “perfect for game nights, parties, classrooms, and a low key bonding activity with new people in your life.” The game is designed for 4-7 players, 12 years and up, though the game length scales considerably with the number of players. Players take turns crafting wild stories using a given premise and required elements; a judge then determines who told the best story.
This week, my team has been prototyping a new game centered around social deduction and getting to know other players. Unsure of which style to lean on more heavily, we created several game prototypes and tested them individually. I took the lead on designing a game that leans towards the ‘getting to know you’ style while still incorporating a hint of social deduction. This game is called One Was a Lie (OWL) and was inspired by a playthrough of Wing It, my most recent game night. In OWL, players also take turns crafting stories based on a premise and required elements. However, these required elements reference the player’s real life, and the player is required to lie about one of them. Players vote on which reference they think was the lie.
Both Wing It and OWL build upon the Impress-the-Judge pattern. However, Wing It is more like traditional Impress-the-Judge games, affording the game more replayability at the cost of worse interactivity between players. In contrast, OWL resolves the interactivity issue, but suffers from worse replayability.
Part 1: Interactivity
In a round of Wing It, one person serves as a judge. Instead of participating in the round, they decide which story was their favorite, and the player who told that story gets a point. Designing the game in this way really makes Wing It a game between the judge and each player rather than a group activity. My job is to learn what kind of story the judge will like, and tell a story that they will vote for. This places Wing It at the ambient coop level of friendship, which is pretty low for a social game. Since players are competing with each other, I’ll invent the term ambient competition to be more accurate.
In OWL, everybody is the judge, so nobody has to sit out. Each player votes individually for which card they think was a lie, and they earn points if they were correct. OWL is more of a soft competition game because you can intentionally affect other players. Each round, there is a debate period where players can try to persuade others to vote a certain way. This period lets players interact with the whole group rather than focusing on a judge. They can intentionally help or hurt other players by persuading the group towards a particular choice. Richer player interactions are what we want in a social game, so I argue this is a better design.
Distributing judgment to a consensus with a debate period would be a pretty simple modification for Wing It. If the designers borrowed those mechanics from OWL, it would elevate the game from ambient to soft competition and increase interactivity between players.
Part 2: Replayability
Moving on to replayability, I argue that OWL, in its current state, is less replayable than Wing It. The stories that players craft in Wing It have no bearing on the real world. They are fantastical, fictional, and absurd. The game creates moments of laughter that we never get tired of. Imagination is boundless, so you’ll never run out of stories to tell.
One could argue that the difficulty curve incentivizes the disclosure pattern for friendship in games. If a player has exhausted all of the trivia of their life, they will have to start bringing up more meaningful references to keep fooling people. Though disclosure encourages deeper friendships, the potential for disclosure in OWL reveals a new problem: we don’t want a player to be brave and reveal something vulnerable only to have the group think it was a lie.
Ultimately, Wing It and OWL use expression as their primary form of fun; these games turn players into storytellers, bringing the unique creativity and personality of each player to the table. Over time, expressing yourself in Wing It stays forever superficial and hilarious, while OWL gets too deep or too easy as players learn more about each other. If we were to improve the design of OWL for replayability, we could try implementing more novelty and absurdity in the game to keep things fresh and lighthearted. One idea I had was to include a deck of modification cards. These cards would tell the player how they must present their story. Whether it’s talking like a pirate or hopping on one leg, these new cards would add some of Wing It’s humor and silliness to OWL. More nuance to each round means more ways to play, increasing replayability.
In the end, our team chose one of the other prototypes to move forward with. Still, creating and analyzing One Was a Lie helped us understand how difficult it is to create mechanics that bring out the experience you want without unintended side effects. We will take what we learned from this game forward to the rest of our design efforts.
