My team is working on a game where the goal is to re-tell a well-known story word by word, but two imposters have specific rules to follow for what kinds of words they can say (for example, all words must have two syllables, all words must relate to animals, etc.). The rest of the players attempt to figure out who the imposters are and what their rule is.
1. How long and often should discussions be held?
This is an important question to answer because there should be enough discussions so that players can determine the spies and their rule at least some of the time, but not so many that they always discover it. It is a careful balance between the two, so it is necessary to prototype this functionality. To prototype it, we could play the similar game Spyfall or a preliminary version of our game with different amounts of discussion and see how the result changes. My guess is that there should be one longer discussion round at the end of the game before deciding so that the players are not influenced by each other to converge on someone without basis. I could also see a version where there is a short discussion each round since that would be more intuitive to the players.
2. What happens if players guess the spies, but not the correct rule?
This question is an important one because there are three final “states” for the game; this one, one where the players guess the spies and their rule to win, and one where the spies stay hidden and win. Thus, there is a “win” state, a “lose” state, and an in-between state without a clear definition. To answer this question, it would be interesting to test people’s reactions to this state being a win state and it being a lose state. Since it is a storytelling game, we could write out “good”, “bad”, and “neutral” endings for each story and poll participants on their sentiments to these mechanics. My guess is that this situation will be a form of loss case for the players.
3. How many storytelling rounds should there be?
This is a vital question because we want enough rounds to tell an approximation of the story (ex. with Jack and Jill, they have to fetch a pail, go up a hill, and fall down the hill), but not so many that the spies are very obvious to the other players. The answer this question, I think it would be useful to just have a group of people try to try to tell a simple folk story word-by-word and see how many rounds of conversation that ends up being. This would help us see how long it takes to flesh out the important details of a story and potentially restrict certain stories to certain group sizes (since our game allows for 4-10 players). My prediction is that around 5-6 rounds would be plenty.
