Week 7

The main challenge of designing a social deduction game is balancing for player interaction. As the amount of different personalities or group dynamics make it next to impossible to make an open ended game that would work the way you intended without stringent rules. Another challenge of designing a social deduction game is making it fit within the theme you wanted, such as Love letter was mentioned in class and how it didn’t really need the theme it just felt tacked on. To try to tackle these I will describe my idea for a social deduction game. I call it mimic, patent pending of course, The main premise of the game will be a interictally designed map with a multitude of objects in it. A small number of the total players will draw a mimic card. Their job will be to keep which object in the room they are hidden while misleading them to decoy objects drawn from a deck of cards featuring all objects, so no player can just remember which objects decoys are you would want to randomize it. The main concepts for this game would be theme and goals. The theme being a group of adventurers wandering into this random room that holds a mimic chosen out of the team at random, the players will also be given different abilities using the different classes shuffled at random to help identify the mimic. The main way to figure this out is the fact that the mimic player isn’t hidden just the object they are. The player chosen to be a mimic’s job is to give them hints to lead them to the decoy items to give them a variety of benefits such as killing another player so they can’t use their abilities or getting more mini-mimics into the game to help overwhelm the players, and the parties goal is to obviously find the mimic and destroy it so they can continue. That was a bit to in depth for just an idea but I believe that the theme would help by giving a fun building block for the player’s to work with during gameplay (macklin and sharp chapter 2 under the theme section). The goals are there since they are the obvious win condition, but there would also be subgoals for each side to help aid them in the goal of winning by eliminating the other side(macklin and sharp chapter 2 under goals, I genuinely can’t find the page numbers).