Week 07- Developing Social Deduction Games

Out of the ten tools listed by Macklin and Sharp I’d say the most important to this type of game is the direct and indirect interaction players have amongst each other. The major dynamic is information and most times the lack thereof so players must use social queues and sometimes information outside of just verbally giving and receiving that info. I think one of the major challenges for this genre is giving each player a role in the game that adds enough to the goal to be interesting to play. Many games have central roles and supporting roles, the major central roles are usually only relegated to few players to do most of the games sniffing out of information and the other roles usually help out in some form. Those roles are the ones most designers should put effort into making fun and really count towards the overall objective.

Now if I was to design a social deduction game, I immediately think of spies and detectives but I can already tell in this genre that theme has been done to death. So, I’d probably go with a fantasy type of theme where there are mages, warriors, thiefs, roles like that and incorporate mechanics to each of those. I think that would help vary up the look and divide up the responsibilities in a cool way.