Clickbait title: Games where you lie to your friends.

I have been and will continue to be interested in boardgames. I think they are a really fascinating discipline of game design, having completely different limitations that videogames. I think computer scientists tend to be used to stuff like infinite dices you can spawn or complex calculations you can run, whilst being starved for the magic that being in the same space can do for social interaction.

Boardgames also have a different way to approach them socially. Boardgames tends to be a thing you go to physically and then stay for an extended period of time. Videogames on the other hand are low commitment and due to the online nature only people who really want to participate will be in the game. In boardgames you mainly will be playing with whoever is around. This also requires the games to be somewhat palatable, depending on the patience of your friends.

For these reasons, I put a lot of focus in being able to provide and teach more small games where the fun starts quickly and the game ends quickly in case someone hates the experience. I tend to also prefer games with high interaction between users for the simple reason that I want to be interacting with my friends. That all being said, there is a gaping hole in my enjoyment of some games that fall into these categories: Social deduction games.

Social deduction games tend to go more or less as follows: Everyone gets dealt a secret role. This role tends to either be on the good team or the bad team. The success state for the good team is to weed out the bad members, who in turn have to lie.

Let’s get the big one out of the way. I suck at lying. Basically the only way I can lie is to just convince myself I’m on the good team and helping them. I think I just hate the social act of not offering up information to my friends. Especially because I love to talk.

I find that the concept of secret evil people puts basically every action under scrutiny. And because these are fundamentally social games, this means every action. Sitting next to someone or bringing out snacks could always be a calculated move. And there isn’t really a way to distinguish simple meta-gestures with in-game planning. Really one of the main ways to win is to confuse the two.

I actually watched some Town of Salem (online social deduction game with text chat) gameplay recently. It was strangely calming because the community is so established in its playstyles that the criticisms I give here generally don’t apply. They know all of the tricks. One I’ve seen experienced players instantly work around is the following: People who took actions which are “bad” for the good team and then say sorry they did not understand a rule of the game.

Why is this so infuriating to me? I think it is because it puts me in a horrible lose-lose. If they are actually in the bad team, they are just covering up for something they thought they could get away with. But they might be in the good team and actually telling the truth. (Especially if they’re playing the game for the first time!) In some ways it’s a question directly at me “Do you care more about my friendship or winning the game”. Now that is a consideration to be made in many games, but the problem is that some people will then think themselves masterminds for doing it. I have been made felt bad before for having empathy in this situation.

Notably, in Town of Salem no-one buys it when you say you made a mistake because you did not understand a rule. They are strangers on the internet and they will vote you out.

Now, I don’t want to harp too much on what seems to be optimal play in these games (cf. Carrot in a Box), which is indeed lying and there is skill in doing it well. But from the games of Among Us I’ve been forced to play, it does feel like the deduction games people like the most contain immense randomness in what evidence exposes you or not. A lot of the greatest moments in these games seem to come from gambles, even more so with certain games which have fully random elements. And so maybe a lot of achievements of masterful lying are just selectively content-farmed.

I also do like calculated gambles. But I like them less so when they come at the expense of my team. There is actually a very strong gamble as an evil player in many of these games which is to throw your teammate under the bus. This works best in games where your power as an evil team does not scale linearly with the number of players still in the evil team. And some games will let you just win if you can hide well enough as the last evil player. I once played a social deduction game where with my optimal information I confidently deduced someone to be unassailably on the good team. I was wrong, due to what was basically a 1 in 20 chance, chosen by someone I never talked a word with. This was the first time I had played Blood on the Clocktower and I have not yet touched it since.

So asking me to play a social deduction game, is a bit like asking someone who is very bad at a sport to play in a team of people who want to win. Also there’s a rule in the game where you can shoot your teammates for extra points.

Speaking of shooting your teammates. These games basically always rely on the good team shrinking as the bad team eliminates people. Sometimes there’s some weird afterlife where people may affect things. But really there is elimination. And someone will need to be eliminated in the first round. And if this is at a physical location, you will need to sit there whilst everyone finishes the game. Or even worse, as an evil player, you will need to choose who you want to sit there and wait. (And you will probably choose a complete stranger in the group because you want to enjoy a fun game with your friends!)

I have a lot more criticisms (for example the existence of neutral roles who basically always exist to be kingmakers, the existing friendgroup dynamics creating horrible asymmetrys, the ideal strategy often being the one hogging the mic and not letting others get a word in, rewarding aggressiveness against others and justifying it, the idea of an ontologically evil faction in real life) but I will leave with the most personal. I want to be in a game where I can more or less freely talk with my friends about how the game is going. This requires not only some level of open information or at least knowledge of probabilities, but the expectation that I am not trying to gain anything from talking. Because I like talking to my friends.

Also the badness of your game is directly proportional to the forced length of it.

Coup is a pretty good game, because it does not have teams, it’s short, and everyone is on the evil team so there’s no obvious “of course I’m on the good team” statement you have to lie.