Spyfall is a social deductive game created in 2014 by Alexandr Ushan and published by Hobby World. It was originally a card game, but has been adapted to online platforms. It is intended for three to eight players ages thirteen and up, and it can be played with friends, family, or strangers. I played an online version through netgames.io with two other friends.
Spyfall successfully emphasizes social deduction because its mechanics drive players to behave in ways opposite to their in-game identity. That is, non-spies can appear like spies and spies can appear like non-spies. The objective for non-spies is to determine who the spy is, while the spy’s objective is to go undetected while trying to determine the location. Players achieve their objectives by asking questions to other players about the location. Since there is only one round per game, players must go into the voting round confident of who to vote out, therefore no one is allowed to lay low and go uninterrogated. Additional mechanics include the list of locations provided to the spy and the different roles assigned to non-spies.
From these mechanics and formal elements arise dynamics where players might act in counterintuitive ways. Since the spy must be successfully chosen at the end of a single round, non-spies take on an additional objective of proving their innocence to the group. This could look like providing a clear, undisputable answer to a question, but this risks revealing the location to the spy. Thus, non-spies might purposefully provide vague answers, similar to what a spy would do when they are unsure of the location. Non-spies are also encouraged to ask a lot of questions because the pressure is on them to correctly determine the spy. This could, however, be read as a spy eager to gather information on the location.
The type of question that is asked reveals important information as well. Well-intentioned non-spies might ask questions that have a very obvious answer in order to root out the spy (in my play-through, that question was “Is there sand at your location?”). At the same time, spies might ask similar, straightforward questions to narrow down the list of locations they are provided. The relevance of the question plays a role as well. A spy might ask a completely irrelevant question (“What is the weather like?” when the location is a restaurant), but a non-spy might ask such a question to throw the spy off or to observe a suspect’s reaction. For example, a quick and confident answer to an irrelevant question would seem suspicious. No matter who asks the question and what their intentions are, it could be interpreted differently by the group.
The existence of different roles complicates the dynamics even further. By introducing different roles, spies are able to justify their suspicious answers by fabricating a story about their role. When I was a spy, I was perhaps too eager to emphasize, “Well in my particular role, I am not interacting with a lot of people.” This also makes non-spies cast doubt on each other, especially if their roles are very different despite being in the same location. If the location was at a Nail Spa, the question “Do you come here to relax?” would result in very different answers depending on if someone’s role was a customer versus a nail technician.
This dynamic of behaving opposite to your in-game identity results in fun in the forms of fellowship and challenge. Fellowship, because you are trying to understand how your fellow players think. Does their seemingly irrelevant question contain some hidden meaning? Could their unconventional answer contain a hint of truth? Together as non-spies, you try to interpret and leave each other vague but also nuanced clues. This is also where the challenge comes in. How do you craft questions and answers that must be interpretable by those sharing the same location but unintelligible to the spy? If you are the spy, how do you make sense of these purposely unintelligible clues while also trying to defend your suspect answers and pass as a non-spy?
