Lattes. Lies. Loyalty. Employees of a brand new cafe are working to create a high-end customer experience before opening day, installing luxury machines and designing a cozy atmosphere. However, among them are saboteurs from a competing cafe, working to ensure they’re not driven out by competition by posing as employees and sabotaging endeavors. Deduce who is working with you or against you before opening day or find that your cafe is in shambles.
Cafe Co-Opp, an aesthetically pleasing game about progression and deception, was created with the intention of taking on a unique approach to how we play and understand social deception games. We wanted, primarily, to create a space that felt inviting and approachable for play among family, friends, and strangers, who may range in level of experience with games. Our design was centered around the premise of creating a cozy atmosphere through cartoon designs to juxtapose the central theme of sabotaging other players, and create a more inviting environment to those who typically experience anxiety during social deception games.
The game itself differs from others in the genre by allowing deceptive players to remain in the game – even if they are suspected of being deceptive, preventing random role assignment from taking away from a player’s experience.
Concept Map and Ideation Exploration:
Much of our early ideation was centered on the premise of creating something that was visually pleasing despite being a social deception game. We noticed that the genre is primarily dominated with games centered on themes of death and violence (Mafia, Secret Hitler, Among Us, Ninja, etc.) and hoped to devise something that could stray away from this. Thus, Cafe Co-Opp was born.
[Image 1: An example of our brain storm for a board design][Image 2: Initial ideas for what to include on chance cards][Image 3: Example of an idea we scrapped, to include subroles in each role][Image 4: Last brainstorm of a game board design before making the life sized draft]
Initial decisions about formal elements and values:
Our values and intentions with the game remained the same throughout the iteration process: we wanted to make the game fun and accessible for all types of people, not dependent on age, game experience, relationship with players, or even physical ability/disability. The importance of this in our game design shaped our process, and Cafe Co-Opp was built with this premise as a foundation, not an afterthought.
However, the formal elements and mechanics did change throughout playtests and iterations in order to create a fun and engaging, but not overly complicated, social deduction game:
Players: Our game initially focused on unilateral competition, where everyone was working to find the saboteur(s). We later shifted to a multilateral competition: even within a team, there is some sense of competition. At the end of the game, the player with the most paycheck money is the all-around winner.
Objectives: The objective of our game depends on your hidden role. If you are a worker, you are working to build a beautiful and functional cafe, which makes this somewhat of a construction game. If you are a saboteur, your goal is to stealthily undermine the workers’ efforts.
Outcomes: As mentioned earlier, we added a paycheck mechanic to add complexity to our outcomes. Instead of being zero sum across workers and saboteurs, there is an additional layer where someone can be on the winning team but still lose.
Rules: From the beginning, we knew that we wouldn’t allow players to cover cards on the board until all slots in that category had been filled. We went back and forth a bit on the process of drawing object cards, ultimately deciding to balance the two mechanics by letting players start with some number of object cards. When we tried letting people draw a card every turn, it resulted in moving through the object cards too quickly. After some of our initial play testing, we added in paychecks and the rule that when you pass payday, you get a paycheck.
Procedures: The game occurs sequentially, with players taking turns, moving through the board by rolling a dice and moving their token. Landing in a square requires you to do that action, unless you have a Chance card allowing you to bypass it. There are special cards and landing spaces that grant players additional bonuses or abilities, and a board space “opening day” which can trigger the special end turn early.
Resources: The physical resources a player requires and has access to are: player tokens; Object, Chance, Paycheck, and Role cards; and the game board itself. All of these materials are provided in the box, and no external resources are necessary.
Boundaries: The board can be thought of as the physical boundary in our game, as this is where all of the events happen, as well as a player’s hand where they store different card types. In regards to game boundaries, the final turn begins when all object cards are gone or someone lands on the ‘Opening Day’ space – though, there are ‘Chance’ cards that allow players to invoke or delay ‘Opening Day’ during a given round.
Testing and iteration history:
Our game concept began simply with the premise of building something physical as a team with some saboteur working against these efforts, be it in a cafe, a bakery, an office workplace, or even a city. At the start, we only knew we wanted our game to take place in a unique, cozy environment to juxtapose the nature of many social deduction games.
The idea to have the game take place on a physical board appeared early on, and transformed our card game into something significantly more complex. While we began the project with four completely different designs for boards, our ideas intertwined beautifully and informed our first draft, which included a traversal system, sections of the cafe to place different objects in, and individual player tokens – elements which we kept and updated along the way.
We had a total of four playtests that informed our final iteration:
Our first playtest was between the four of us and primarily meant to understand how the game mechanics work together, building our own game by integrating some mechanics we were familiar with. We initially had ideas about voting out whomever other players suspected to be saboteurs – as this is a mechanic involved in most social deception games – but ultimately decided we wanted to find a way to continue including players in the game regardless of their assigned role to ensure it stayed fun for everyone. Then, our game took a significant shift in needing to create mechanics that include an incentive for saboteurs to keep their roles hidden throughout the game despite the safety of never being removed from it. During this playtest, we also changed the board configuration to create a minimalist yet involved design for the layout, which we ended up sticking with through the final iteration! Accessibility was also an important factor in design, so we ensured to create a variety of unique colors and symbols to allow colorblind players, younger players, and inexperienced players to indulge in the fun![Playtest 2: First time playing the game outside of our project team!]
The second playtest took place during class, where we explained the game to strangers and asked them to play. During this playtest, fault game mechanics about turn sequences and actions became clear, and we realized the distribution of 50/50 roles created a lack of incentive to be deceptive about which “side” a player is on. Then, after this playtest we decided to include the option for players to start their turn by drawing or discarding an object card, and then rolling the dice. This mechanic would make it easier for players to have a variety of cards in their hand, and avoid players having no cards to play on their turn. Despite the game having flaws at this point, there were many observable “moments of fun” where players were laughing and engaging with players they didn’t know, which was encouraging for our understanding of what makes our game fun!
The third playtest also took place during class, where we had players traversing a new draft of the board using our final card designs. During this playtest we decided to change the ratio of saboteurs to employees to provide incentive for hidden roles, as we felt that keeping the 50:50 ratio and adding an additional mechanic would overcomplicate the game. We decided an appropriate ratio would depend on the number of players (see ‘Rules’), and we adjusted the star threshold (winning condition) accordingly. Further, we decided to add another dice into the game to reduce the probability of more than one player at a single space at a time, adding to the unexpectability of actions on any turn.
The last playtest took place in a new setting with players who were not in the class and not familiar with our game. During this playtest we noticed that players were accumulating significantly more object cards than they were able to put down, and further, object cards were being collected frequently on the board spaces. Ultimately, we decided to remove the turn mechanic that caused[Playtest 4: Accomplished team members excited after the last playtest!]players to draw or discard an object card before their turn. We also decided to remove the “Do nothing” space, and replace it with the option for players to discard or place an object card. This way, players retain the ability to discard undesired cards, while also not carrying too many in their hand at once.
Final Version of Project:
Please view our final playtest video here, as well as our Print and Play, and our Figma Page which also contains older design iterations!
