Featured image is clickbait. Since my post talks a lot about cards, actions, and balance, I wanted to put the glorious 2 mana 55 damage as the thumbnail. Butch will understand.
Our team is thinking of making a hidden-role social deduction game. One key feature common across all of our ideation is that we would like to remove the death aspect of games like Mafia, where once you are dead you have no way of interacting with the game. To fix this, our objective is going to likely feature some overarching public goal, while an adversarial team tries to complete either a hidden or alternative goal. Everyone should be able to participate from the beginning to the end of the game, and we are thinking of giving everyone some kind of action (whether by having unique roles for everyone, or by having some kind of common actions, or by having card-based actions).
One of the most important questions to ask is whether players feel like they are overwhelmed by choice. If we decide to give every player actions to do every turn, we want to make sure that they don’t waste a lot of time deliberating what to do every turn. If the options that we give them are too complex, it may end up being confusing. Or, at worst, having too much unnecessary complexity could turn our game from social deduction to a strategy game. To address this, we should make prototypes with different levels of complexity. For instance, we could simulate a Mafia game with some of the actions that we may incorporate into our game — even if it’s not the same game, it may be a good heuristic to figure out how people feel about our system for taking actions. My guess is that the players will like actions that are short and easily memorable.
Another question to answer is what system of actions feels the best to use. One thing that we discussed was how “common actions” that are performable by every player can be very polarizing and make the game feel solved. For instance, in the game Coup, the actions of taking 1 coin or taking 2 coins and being blocked by a duke are underwhelming in a pure strategical sense, but the namesake feature of spending 7 to perform a coup is centralizing. On the other hand, limited-action systems like drawing and playing cards runs the risk of more frustrating worst-case scenarios. Role-specific actions have the specific difficulty of being difficult to design, and even more difficult to balance. The way to prototype this is to create the same game with all of the different action systems, and see if players think it felt like they had sufficient agency under that scheme. Note the question isn’t necessarily whether they think the balance was good — we want to probe if they think it is a systems issue or a balance issue. My guess is that with sufficiently good design, the frustration points of a card-based design could be mitigated, so I would guess that to be most effective.
Finally, will the game be easy to pick up? Each additional rule/possible action we add to the game is another level of complexity for the player to grasp. We need to ask whether the game takes too long to learn because we don’t want to design a game that reveals its intricacies after the player stops caring to learn them. One frustration I especially want to avoid is the comment: “I didn’t know he could do that, that’s unfair!” (what I like to call the Yu-Gi-Oh phenomenon). To test this, we should make prototypes with varying amounts of rules, and have players comment on which one they felt most comfortable with — were they bored or overwhelmed at any point?
An overall question to answer, but not necessarily design prototypes to target, is whether the game is replay-able. We want to avoid making a game that has a very limited number of permutations or game states. Otherwise, I think it would be a waste for someone to create/buy our game, only to replay one of the same 10 situations.
