P1: Let Them Eat Cake – The Mechanics of Magic

Created by Team 11: Kristine Ma, Varsha Saravanan, Yinlin Zhao, Yosief Abraham

Artist statement ⊹ ࣪ ˖🍰₊˚⊹♡

It is the eighteenth century, and the peasants are starving. In response to the bread shortage, Marie Antoinette has famously (and iconically) said, “Let them eat cake!” The peasants become violent. Marie Antoinette flees the palace, but unfortunately lands herself among the peasantry. The peasants know she is among them, but she has disguised herself. To root her out and send her to the guillotine, they come up with a plan…

Designed for a group of 5-10 players, ages 13+, Let Them Eat Cake is a French Revolution–themed, social mediation card game in which players— the French commoners— creatively respond to prompts through writing. However, there’s a twist: Marie Antoinette, with her royal personality, is given a secret constraint on her responses. The peeved peasants must identify her.

Our intention was to allow for players to find fun from fellowship— game as social framework— as players reveal their voices and humor through their responses, Marie Antoinette bluffs, and the “peeved peasants” playfully argue with each other over the identity of the Queen. Our game also incorporates expression, as all players are able to express themselves through their free-form responses, as well as challenge, as players designated as “peeved peasants” work to identify the Queen, and Marie bends her given constraint to its limits to stay out of suspicion. Secondarily, our game also incorporates narrative as prompts are Revolution-themed, and the rules encourage players to tap into their new identities (or masquerade as a peasant.)

Long live the queen!

Just kidding. (Unless you’re Marie, of course.)

Concept map 𐙚🧁₊ ⊹

Figure 1: Concept map of the system of “Let Them Eat Cake”!

Initial decisions 𐙚🧁₊ ⊹

Although our final game diverged quite a bit in terms of mechanics and narrative from our original game, our initial decisions on the formal elements and values we wanted to achieve with our game stayed consistent throughout.

We wanted to create a game that would incorporate expression, challenge, and fantasy/narrative, but overall, we wanted to create a game that promoted social bonding, so we decided that fellowship would be the aesthetic we wanted to focus on primarily. After brainstorming individually, sharing them with each other as a group, and voting on our favorite ideas, we settled on a game that would combine creative writing inspired by fun prompts (expression) with some element of competition.

Figure 2: Our initial values

Figure 3: A sample of an initial brainstorm for mechanics

We initially took great inspiration from Quiplash, Cards Against Humanity, and We’re Not Really Strangers, but wanted a heavier focus on creative writing and personal expression, encouraging players to be silly and imaginative; we initially had a vague idea of differentiating ourselves not through mechanics, but through prompts (e.g. “Write the last lines of a horror film,” or “Write a message you’d find in a bottle,” but also prompts like “What’s your biggest red flag?”) The mechanics, though, were largely that of Cards Against Humanity.

We realized, however, that the game was bordering too dangerously on the edge of these existing games. We then came up with the idea of separating the players into teams, shifting the competition structure from individual to team-based. In this version, after a random prompt is picked, the players split into two teams, but all answer the prompt individually in Google Forms. The Judge (a rotating role) reads all responses, and decides which response is the best (most creative or funniest, depending on the prompt.) The player with the selected response earns a point for their team. The other, non-selected team gets a chance to guess who wrote each response (with a rotating role.) If the person guesses all authors correctly, the other team is also rewarded a point. The team with the most points at the end wins.

However, even this idea seemed to fall a bit flat in terms of creativity; creating fun, new, and imaginative prompts didn’t seem to be enough to differentiate us from existing games or immerse our players. Thus, we pivoted to another idea, which we ultimately used for our first two playtests.

Our second, team-based idea, had introduced the element of having to know each other and become familiar with each other’s voices and humor, in order to guess the author of each response. This would certainly work towards our fellowship aesthetic by adding a new opportunity to demonstrate closeness, as well as a chance to learn what friends might write, and also laugh when you mistakenly think Alex wrote his biggest red flag is “I have 192 unread iMessages but lowkey I like keeping them unread because it makes me look popular” but it was actually Kate who wrote it. We took this idea, along with the team-based competition structure, as well as the creative writing / prompt mechanics, and created a new idea under the aesthetic of playing cards— which led to ideas about royal romances and Alice in Wonderland— which better added to the fantasy/narrative aesthetic that we initially considered but that the prompts didn’t contribute fully to.

Figure 4: Deck of standard playing cards that we used for our prototype

The game we ultimately decided on and playtested for our first two rounds consisted of roles determined by a deck of playing cards, which include one King and one Queen card. Players are randomly given cards. A prompt is drawn from the Prompt Deck, and each person responds via Google Forms (to account for players recognizing each other’s handwriting.) The King tries to select the Queen based on their response to the prompt (i.e. the King tries to figure out what response is most likely to be the Queen’s response/humor/writing style.) The author reveals that they wrote the selected response. The other players try to imitate the Queen, to deceive the King. If the King selects the Queen, the Royal team wins. Otherwise, after X (two or maybe more, depending on size of the group) incorrect guesses, the Commoner team wins. Generally, the King selects the response they believe was written by the Queen. The King and Queen are trying to win as a pair, and everyone else is trying to prevent them from finding each other.

Testing and iteration 𐙚🧁₊ ⊹

Playtest #1

Our first playtest was conducted in class by two of our group members with six students as players. After hearing that the players wanted to keep their roles hidden, the moderator complied.

This first iteration of the game had a major issue: the King’s identification of the Queen was completely arbitrary— no one knew who the Queen was, it was entirely up to the Queen to somehow communicate their identity to the King. Being that our playtesters were strangers to each other, the Queen wasn’t able to come up with differentiating answers to the prompt—they were rather unfamiliar with each other’s writing styles and sense of humor. Although we originally intended the game to be a game for those who are already friends, this did not fit our ideal of broad inclusion; we realized that we wanted to make a game that could also be playable for strangers who wanted to create new friendships, such as our random players in class. To compensate, one of our group members stepped in as a pseudo-moderator and began asking the King personal questions like “What is your major?” and “Which artists do you like?” This was an interesting pivot as players were incentivized to have more informal conversations with the new people they just met, and someone commented that this game felt like a better “We’re Not Really Strangers.”

Figure 5: Players discussing in Playtest #1

Despite this adjustment, we realized that the Queen does not have any advantage over the other players as she is receiving the same amount of information as everyone else, so the game simply became the King choosing the response they found funniest or most fitting. Additionally, the game’s effect on forming an inclusive social environment was still unbalanced, since everyone only asked questions and interacted with the King. Each time the King selected a response, the player would reveal their role to the rest of the group (either being a Peasant and having the game continue or being a Queen and having the game end).

While the Queen was discovered immediately in the first round, this discovery was owed more to luck than anything else, especially with the smaller number of players in the group. Besides this major issue, our first playtest also brought to light some other logistical issues, such as whether to rotate the Queen’s role each round, whether the player with the Queen’s role staying anonymous made the game easier, and the procedure for sharing and judging prompt responses.

Playtest #2

Our second playtest was conducted in class by two of our group members with six students as players. Since we decided to keep roles hidden in Playtest #1, for the second iteration, we tested with roles revealed. That being said, players felt that it was unnatural to reveal their roles (and expressed surprise when asked to do so.)

We realized, however, that perhaps it was unnatural to use standard playing cards – because of common card game mechanics, players may have instinctively felt they needed to keep their cards (and therefore their roles) hidden. While players were excited to answer the chosen prompt, they also expressed unfamiliarity with each other’s writing styles. Several players indicated that if they knew the Queen’s style of writing and sense of humor, it would have made the game much more enjoyable— a finding that also emerged in Playtest #1. Without that familiarity, they were left to guess based on suspicions about who might have written each response.

Figures 6: Responses from Playtest #2 (the Queen had written ‘My king <3,’ with nothing much to go off of to give hints or reveal herself, especially since she and the King were strangers.)

One player also suggested, as the playtesting groups switched, that we might consider implementing personality cards. Although this was an unfinished idea mentioned right at the end of our playtest, we thought that this was a helpful suggestion that would give strangers a baseline of “personal” information to play from.

After these two playtests, we quickly realized that despite alternating between keeping roles revealed and keeping roles hidden, the mechanics of our game needed significant repair. After an emergency brainstorming session, in which we explored the ideas of having hidden roles as opposed to visible roles, we arrived at the idea of the Queen having an unknown constraint, and the King having to identify her through a constraint, an idea inspired by a player’s feedback in Playtest #2. After more iterations of brainstorming, however, we realized that the King role was an unnecessary mechanic; the group as a whole could work together to determine the identity of the Queen. We then shifted the aesthetic of the game, as well, creating a more specific narrative: the Queen role could be Marie Antoinette, and the other players could be peeved peasants. Thus, Let Them Eat Cake was born.

Playtest #3

Our third playtest was conducted in class by two of our group members with six students as players, and we tested our newly redesigned game, Let Them Eat Cake. One player was assigned as the Queen and all others were peasants. Unlike earlier versions, the Queen now had to blend in among the peasants while following a secret constraint, allowing her to be identified even among players unfamiliar with each other, better following the aesthetic of inclusive fellowship.

Players were able to quickly grasp the rules from reading the rulebook (the moderator and notetaker stepped back and only answered clarifying questions when necessary, although also noting them down to improve the rulebook— for example, players were not quite sure what a “constraint” looked like exactly, so we made a note to include some examples.) Players began to answer their prompts and discussed their suspicions of each other’s responses while each player defended their own responses claiming they were innocent peasants. We noticed a significantly higher level of interaction between players, which helped eliminate the barrier of unfamiliarity that people were facing in the first two iterations.

Figure 7: Players discussing in Playtest #3

That said, in both the two rounds we played, the Queen survived. Although the Queen was clever in their choice of responses, players indicated that the constraints were too broad, and they weren’t sure what would fall into the category of “constraint.” They were unsure if they were supposed to look for a general idea, specific grammatical structure/pattern, or hidden words. Additionally, players were unsure if they were supposed to roleplay and tap into the French Revolution theme with their responses or defenses, or if they were supposed to answer as themselves.

We noted that we had to clarify some of these ideas in the rulebook, but we also realized that it was still a bit difficult to identify the Queen with our existing constraints. We initially figured that it might be more difficult for the Queen to hide— especially since the Queen was playing as a lone figure, whereas the peasants were playing as a team to identify her— but realized soon that because of the creative nature and the general mystery of identities, it was actually not as difficult for the Queen to disappear into the smoke. As a result, we realized that some of our initial constraints for the Queen were much too difficult for the peasants to identify (for example, one of our initial constraints was “avoid the letter ‘e’ in your responses.” This constraint wasn’t ever picked, but it is easy to imagine how this constraint might be difficult for players to guess, even if they identify the Queen based on general suspicion.)

Even when the Queen revealed herself as well as her constraint, the peasants were puzzled. The Queen’s constraint for the first round, for example, was that each of her responses had to include a location. The Queen, however, was extremely crafty, and used “my bed” as a location. We realized that the Queen herself could be creative and bend the limits of her constraints to remain hidden, and that as creators of the game, we did not necessarily have to adjust the difficulty level so much. For our next iteration, we adjusted the difficulty of the constraints (for example, we replaced the letter avoiding constraint with constraints like “incorporate pop songs / singers into your responses,” which we hoped would level out the playing field.

Link to Google Folder of Playtest #3 videos!

Playtest #4

Our fourth and final playtest was conducted during Game Night by two of our group members with five students as players. Again, we tested Let Them Eat Cake with improved constraints (designed to be slightly easier), prompts that had not been tested in Playtest #3, properly sized cards, and the finalized rulebook.

Figure 8: Players writing in Playtest #4

The feedback we received from players was again helpful for creating our final prototype. Like in Playtest #3, even with the revised constraints, players still had difficulty grasping the range of possible constraints, and suggested that we could create categories for constraints (e.g. grammar, word count, colors, locations, etc.) We also received confusion again from how much players should tap into the French Revolution theme.

To address these concerns, we ultimately decided on revising the winning condition for peasants from having to guess both the queen and the constraint to win to just having to correctly identify the queen. Additionally, to clarify and solidify the role of the French Revolution as a theme, we decided that instead of instructing the players to respond accordingly in a certain way, we would make the prompts French Revolution themed (for example, instead of prompts like “My toxic trait is thinking I can fix ___”, we created prompts like “The pettiest reason I had a peasant executed was because ___”) which would naturally allow players to either tap more into the theme (or bring in personal elements), which we also clarified in the rulebook.