The game I played is called “Coup,” a board game created by Rikki Tahta and published by Indie Boards & Cards. The game has a target audience of those who are ages 13+.
While Coup and Weasel are both centered around the concept of social deduction, they diverge in their approach to deception and the type of behaviors they reward. Coup is a multilateral game about strategic manipulation of power and influence through bluffing about abilities, whereas Weasel is a unilateral game that challenges players’ emotional intelligence and reasoning skills to separate the truth from the lies in a much more personal, discussion-based context. Weasel pushes social deduction through more lighthearted discussions from general prompts, while Coup gamifies it through mechanical plays via abilities.
Coup features a tightly bounded, turn-based system with a fixed set of roles (e.g., Duke, Assassin) and limited player actions per turn (tax, assassinate, coup, etc.). Victory is achieved by accumulating coins to “coup” other players and bluffing and deceiving your way to be the last one standing. By contrast, Weasel Game has no board or turn order, relying on players discussing their opinions on a specific prompt.
In Coup, each player has two hidden cards representing characters with unique abilities and properties. Players can pretend to have these abilities, and others can challenge them if they believe they are bluffing. If the bluff is called and it is revealed that the player has lied, they lose a card; otherwise, the challenger does. Once you lose both cards, you are out of the game. The threat of elimination creates a constant tension where players are constantly observing each other’s actions to determine what cards players actually have.
Unlike Coup, which evokes the competitive aesthetic through its zero-sum outcome, there is no elimination mechanism in Weasel. Mechanically, Coup has concrete, repeatable actions tied to roles. The fantasy aesthetic is heavily used here as each player plays like the influence card they are given. For example, whenever I had the ‘Duke’ card, I’d always say “how do you ‘duke,’ fellow rich people” as I take a tax of three coins during my turn” or how my friend Rachel would always apologize right before she steals two coins from my friend Victor in the game.
Weasel has one mechanic: truth vs lie explored through discussion. In Weasel, players accumulate points for correctly guessing the weasel—if there is one—or fooling the entire table as the weasel through discussion. Otters (non-weasel players) must work together to figure out who the weasel is, evoking the fellowship aesthetic as most players share a common goal. Outside the voting process however, weasel completely removes any mechanical actions and builds its social tension from players’ answers to binary prompts. When prompted “dog or cat,” Otters must answer truthfully and Weasels must lie. The game’s deception lies in what is said and how it is said, creating a more social and narrative-based experience (as players can use personal anecdotes to further solidify their reasonings), evoking the expression aesthetic, which is absent in coup due to players wanting to withhold as much information as possible from others to gain an advantage.
For example, if the prompt touches on something someone may feel strongly about such as: “What is the best dorm on campus”, the Weasel is forced to lie, but in a believable and morally convincing way. The Otter, conversely, must be honest—which ironically can also make them seem suspicious if their truth sounds unbelievable. When we first playtested this game in our group, one of the prompts we had was “east campus or west campus,” I argued that west campus was better due to its proximity to the climbing wall and swimming pool, citing past experiences there, though the other players (my groupmates) thought I was lying since I’ve lived in east campus these past two years.
Compared to coup, which allows players to strictly lie about their influence cards, weasel gives players much more freedom to lie and deceive others. However, what Coup does extremely well is that it manages to increase the stakes over time, as players will eventually coup or assassinate others until there is one victor left. While players can earn points in Weasel, the game itself lacks a definitive end. Players just continue to accumulate points through rounds. There is no tension forcing players to take bigger risks, since Weasel is meant to be a more social game rather than a competitive one with social elements like Coup. Each round in Weasel may take up a few minutes, but the game can last for hours as players come up with new prompts. A game of Coup, on the other hand, might only take up several minutes.
