Hidden Objectives

Jack Ryan — P1 Writup

Artist’s Statement:

I designed Hidden Objectives with the intent of bringing out “table talk” from it’s players. In most strategy games, speaking about what other players are doing or calling attention to it is frowned upon, but I often find it to be one of the most fun things about playing these games. I wished for my players to have to constantly evaluate the risk and reward of their decisions, identify more powerful strategies or positions, and to try and fool each other with their actions.

I wanted my gameplay loop to include incomplete information; every move players made should have to force contemplation and analysis from their opponents, who would be forced to grab onto the breadcrumbs of true intent in order to outwit or take advantage of any possible mistakes. Suspicion, theory crafting, and the way you present yourself at the table should be part of the game and encouraged through it’s design. The real win condition are these sidebar conversations that I set out to achieve, and I hope that a key moment or risky decision that payed off will still be talked about even after the game has ended.

The target audience for my game are those who love strategy games with a fun deceptive twist. I am imagining that a lot of poker players would love to play Hidden Objectives to test out their bluffing ability or to practice cultivating a trusting image while sabotaging their opponents. This is not a game to play at a loud party or social event but rather to hunker down with your friends and enjoy each other’s company. The tension lies in the suspicious glances, giggling, and trying your best to show no emotion while lying your you know what off.

Concept Map, Ideation Exploration, Concept Sketches:

Initial decisions about formal elements and values of my game:

My game originally tried to draw social interaction and mediation from the “hidden goal” that each player has. The rules (below this paragraph) that I originally designed intended for this hidden goal be a risky win condition, I was drawing parallels in my mind to “shooting the moon” in the card game Hearts, where the self sabotaging play is actually a carefully orchestrated strategy to achieve this dominant goal. The rest of the game was strategically based, where luck or other mechanics out of the player’s control were minimized/removed altogether.

First Draft Rules:

Each player is given 3 actions per turn, these actions can be either to expand their area by one node, or to “reinforce” a node they already control.

At the beginning of your turn, you gain 5 points to spend.

Reinforcement of a node and expansion into an available node both cost 1 point. Reinforcing a node increases the cost for another player to take it by 1 point, you can reinforce a node up to 2 times.

Node with no reinforcement: costs 1 to take
Node with 1 reinforcement: 2 to take
Node with 2 reinforcement: 3 to take

The supply line: If a node or nodes are left “isolated” after a player’s move, with no path back to the player’s beginning tile, those nodes are removed from the players control. I imagine this like the “supply line” back to the starting square being severed.

Special nodes:

Cities (medium circles) cost 3 to take
The Capitol City (large circle) costs 7 to take.

Each player also begins the game with a secret objective. These objectives encourage the players to play suboptimally. If a player completes their secret objective, they reveal it to the table and they win the game. Some examples of secret objectives I have come up with are:

Have your own supply line severed thrice.
Lose one of your own reinforced areas thrice.

The main and globally known win condition is to “capture” all of the opponent’s starting nodes, or to be the last one standing.

First Draft Board Design:

For the cardboard game board prototype, I put some initial thought into the map design and how it could impact strategy.

Regions that promote looping
1. Creating a “loop” is a tactic that makes it far more difficult for another player to make your nodes isolated. I tried to give each area around the starting tiles sufficient space to create loops.
Capitol City Distance
1. Each starting area is equidistant (in both moves and cost) from the capitol city. Each player can take reach the capitol in the same number of nodes.
Access to a City
1. Each starting area is nearby a 3-cost city.
Corners connecting.
1. I thought it would be a fun idea to have the tiles in the very corners of the map connect to each other diagonally. I was envisioning a “cave” that players walk into and then come out on the other side. Like a shortcut in the came Clue.

Testing and Ideation history:

First, I played with the points system and secret objectives that I mentioned earlier, with the original and unchanged ruleset from the initial first draft. This turned out to not deliver the amount of social interaction that I wished for; there was a lot of silent play, where players were contemplating their next move in silence, there was little to no interaction and nothing was said along the lines of “oh I think his hidden objective is X.” Nobody was second guessing other players’ moves. The whole point of the game was to encourage table talk and other discussion, and either the strategy element itself was too overpowering or speaking to each other had to be baked in to the rules itself.

Big change

I decided that these rules were potentially unsalvageable if the purpose of the game was to promote social interaction. There was just far too much strategy built in for players to want to speak with each other. So I scrapped the points and secret goals, and transformed Hidden Objectives into a bluffing game with dice rolls. Here were the new rules that I implemented:

Explaining the rules was taking a while, and it made it difficult for players to immediately understand what they were supposed to do when and added a barrier to them just “jumping in” and enjoying the game. Additionally, there was a large problem with the rules. It quickly became apparent that the rules I had developed were pretty easily exploitable. The issue was that the payoffs for the decision tree each player has are not balanced, and some are heavily more favorable than others. For example, the decision to lie about getting a sufficiently high roll was by far the best move in the game. Because the reward of getting to go again if nobody challenged you was so strong that it was the most favorable option every single time. I made a decision matrix to help understand why this was the case:

Result of Roll	Announcement	Un-challenged	If Challenged
High Enough	Truth (“success”)	Capture tile	Capture tile, choose tile of the challenging player to -2 in cost.
	Lie (“failure”)	Cost to capture the tile -1. Extra Turn	Cost to capture tile +2.
Too Low	Truth (“failure”)	Cost to capture the tile -1.	Cost to capture tile -2. Choose tile of challenging player to -1.
	Lie (“success”)	Capture tile. Extra Turn	Cost to capture tile +2.

The issue with this is that the cells that net you an extra turn, the ones where you lie and get away with it, are very valuable. In particular, the bottom row where you do not roll enough and lie that you did, is so appealing for board expansion and control that after players realized this every announcement was “Success” or “I got it.” Capturing a tile is very valuable but the extra turn is even more so, so after several minutes of play the whole game collapses into “success, success, success, ….”. The square where you get to capture the tile AND take an extra move is so valuable that players will do anything to get it, as it cascades momentum. To fix this imbalance, I needed to disincentivize lying about success (row 3), as the punishment/reward is clearly imbalanced. Additionally, I also needed to incentivize lying about getting the roll.
I only modified the decision tree, so that these were the following options the players had:

Result of Roll	Announcement	Un-challenged	If Challenged
High Enough	Truth (“success”)	Capture tile	Capture tile, choose tile of the challenging player to -2 in cost.
	Lie (“failure”)	Cost to capture tile -1. If possible, expand into one undeveloped farmland.	Cost to capture tile +2. Lose your next turn.
Too Low	Truth (“failure”)	Cost to capture tile -1. If possible, expand into one undeveloped farmland.	Cost to capture tile -2. Choose another tile of challenging player to also -2.
	Lie (“success”)	Capture tile.	The tile you made the “attack” from becomes unclaimed, lose your next turn.

The new decision matrix solves several issues that the first one had. Firstly, both of the “unchallenged failure” options now grant the same benefit and are far more enticing. The combination is attractive enough to entice those who roll high to potentially lie about failing, but not too strong as to say that missing the roll is a better outcome than rolling the required amount. Getting caught in a bluff is also far more punishing, instead of rewarding players for bluffing when they already get their preferred outcome, they instead face the risk of losing their next turn and losing some of their positions. In this case though, the penalties are not mirrored, as I wish to incentivize players to lie more often about not getting their required roll. Finally, honest announcements are now no longer the worse option, both times when a player is called for bluffing when they were not, the bluffer loses significantly more. The end goal is for the percentage of lies to decrease, but the advantage gained from lying is still enticing. I am hoping for a bluff-truth balance of around 30-70%.

Final Playtest

Here is a link to the final playtest video as well as embedded below. It is quite long and did not capture the entirety of the game before my phone ran out of storage :(.
I also printed out a huge version of the board that I had designed in figma for this playtest. It made the experience way more fun to see the game played on a finished and polished looking board.