Vigour Games

By Joey Vigour (Designer, Chaosmos & GROWL)

To celebrate the INSANE FINAL DAY of my Kickstarter game GROWL I am reposting a hugely updated version of my social deduction/hidden roles game list.

Despite what some hardcore tabletop gamer “friends” may say, social deduction is NOT a withering genre, but an ever-evolving one. The mysteries are not unlocking to reveal aged rusted mechanisms within, they are blooming and propagating into new generations of infinite variation and beauty… a new mini-renaissance of the “old school” deduction games of yesteryear. I’m going to mention just some of the lighter, more casual games in the social deduction/hidden roles genre. (If you are a more dedicated detective and deceiver, check out Battlestar Galactica by Corey Konieczka, or its baby cousin, Dark Moon by Evan Derrick.)

Werewolf/Mafia is the classic but takes hours to play, and eliminated players just have to sit there and wait, sometimes for hours. Bang! by Emiliano Sciarra sort of improves this a tiny bit by shortening the game, but it also distracts from the actual hidden roles and makes it more card-driven. Honestly I don’t think Bang! is anywhere near as good as Werewolf. But it also came out in 2002, so it is practically as old as Werewolf and deserves a pass for inspiring many other games.

A quick shout to WitchHunt by Kyle Brockman for slightly improving Werewolf by letting the dead players have some voting powers and the ability to try to protect some of their living teammates (villagers), or cause more chaos from beyond the grave (witches).

Red Riding Hood: Full Moon Rising is a new prototype from Ta-Te Wu, liking hitting the scene late this year or early next year. It’s a definite improvement on the Bang! style mechanics of being able to shoot players and deduce their role, etc. There’s bombs and things, and it’s a hoot and a howl (excuse the pun). [image: Red Riding Hood]

One Night Ultimate Werewolf from Ted Alspach and Akihisa Okuiis may be the go-to these days… but I think there’s some issues with it (still requires a moderator/phone app, too complicated for casual gamers, suffers from the “alpha gamer problem” where the loudest players often take charge). It doesn’t really work with my group for some reason. One Night Ultimate Alien is better, but a bit complicated for the casual crowd. He has a new game coming to Kickstarter next week called One Week Ultimate Alien, which appears to add a board and area movement of some kind to the basic ONUWW system.

Crossfire by Emerson Matsuuchi is very similar to One Night, but even shorter. It takes place in exactly 3 minutes. Players have more hard information and a few various powers. Players simultaneously point their finger to “shoot” someone, and then roles are revealed. Definitely worth a look.

2 Rooms and a Boom (by Alan Gerding and Sean McCoy) improves on the live action role play elements of Werewolf in many ways, and introduces a two-location area-movement mechanic, and players physically move and are “traded” into the other room, where information is gleaned slowly while a clock counts down only 15 or so minutes. One team wants the Bomber to be in the same room as the President after 3 rounds of moving people. The game is wonderful but an extremely uneven experience because of the dozens of weirdly-interacting roles/powers. I would have preferred only a few tightly balanced card sets (although there are several suggestions in the rulebook and online).

Mafia de Cuba by Philippe des Pallières, Loïc Lamy is a very clever “light” game which comes in a cigar box. Players take turns secretly stealing diamonds or a poker chip with a secret role (thus you get to choose a hidden role from whatever is left in the box). The Godfather and his minions try to root out the betrayers.

Salem 1692 by Travis Hancock is one of my favorites of the “new generation” – I personally prefer it to Secret Hitler (and I mildly prefer Secret Hitler over The Resistance, and I prefer The Resistance to Coup, and I prefer Coup to Mascarade). Players have 3-5 tryal (trial) cards, depending on the number of players. The village’s goal is to locate and reveal all the tryal cards labeled “Witch” (the remaining ones say “not a witch). You can place Accusation tokens one people you suspect, and when they get too many they are forced to reveal one of their tryal cards (at the discretion of the last player who accused them).

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong by Tobey Ho is a bit like Dixit or Mysterium, in that there’s art images that you are using to convey information to certain players (in this case information about a crime), but with the added delight of some simple hidden roles like Accomplice and Witness.

Everyone knows about Spyfall by Alexandr Ushan, a wonderful little inversion where there’s a traitor who is trying to “fit in” and several related games like The Chameleon and A Fake Artist Goes to New York. I won’t get into too many “traitor mechanic” games but I mention Spyfall because it naturally leads into an amazing “inversion” of the traitor mechanic… Fall Guy.

Fall Guy is an amazing and very simple prototype game by Jon Perry, coming next year from [xxxx not allowed to say xxxx]. We’re criminals and one of us is the “fall guy” we are trying to pin the crime on. Our role card says who the fall guy is, but one of our role cards is LYING to us! What a genius mechanism! So we’re going through the game and we are all trying to quietly communicate via our actions and purposely confusing sentences, making sure we are on the same page and trying to each get the right card in hand to pin the crime. But whoever happens to be the fall guy has to “go to the police” before we pin the crime. The game is probably coming out next year and it is fantastic.

Good Cop Bad Cop by Brian Henk/Clayton Skancke is a 52 card hidden identity, deduction game where each player takes on the role of a law enforcement officer in a corrupt district. Players must investigate others to figure out who is on their side, grab one of the 2-3 guns on the table, and shoot the opposing leader to win the game. There’s alternate versions themed as Leaders of Euphoria and a prototype based around Total Recall.

Tradecraft print-and-play by Steven Cole uses a cool system where the roles are only part of what gives you points (you also get points if you stay alive and if you have certain points-giving cards. Really interesting game but I haven’t been able to get my group into it.

Timebomb [also called Don’t Mess With Cthulhu, and also Tempel des Schreckens] by 佐藤 雄介(Yusuke Sato) is a great, very simple game you can even make at home. We’re on a bomb squad trying to clip the red wires and then deactivate the bomb. The Terrorists want to have the bomb flipped (go off) before the bomb squad activates it. But we don’t know who the terrorists are. Players have 5 cards to start. they look at them but then shuffle them up and place them out in front of themselves. The cards are all blank except 3 red wires and the bomb. On your turn you reach out and flip up a card. If the bomb goes off before the 3 wires are flipped, the terrorists win. After each player has flipped a card, the round starts over, minus the cards already flipped, so the total number of cards each round is reduced. Very exciting and brilliant design.

Mayday Mayday by Stephanie Brandl is also very clean and simple – each player on an airplane is either Honest or an Infiltrator. You know your role because you have 3 cards and whichever role you have 2 of is your true team. Players spend their turn looking at one other role card and speaking/lying about what they see.

Human Punishment from Godot Games uses a similar (but more complex) system to define your role (you have 3 role cards. if you have 2 of one type, Humans or Machines, then you are that role, and if all 3 role cards are different then you are an Outlaw, meaning you want all non-outlaws to die.

Patriots and Redcoats combines elements of The Resistance and the 3 card role aspect of Mayday Mayday, with the 2 Rooms and a Boom concept of getting the Assassin and Leader together to end the game. I haven’t played it but it looks most similar to Secret Hitler, but with a lot of interesting twists and interacting powers (like everyone having to pass one of their three roles to the left, etc.). Also a twist in that if one of your role cards is a Leader (George Washington/King George) then you are secretly that leader’s faction, even if your other two roles are the opposite faction.

Transylvanian Pickup is a prototype from Dave “Get Bit” Chalker, and I believe it has been at Unpub in the past. There’s 18 cards featuring monsters and your current role is the monster pointing at you. On your turn you either draw a new card or cast a vote for another player (you can change it next turn if you get one). When all players have cast a vote, or instead if the deck is empty, you check for a winner based on the powers and objectives of each monster.

Shadow Hunters is a 2005 game from Yasutaka Ikeda, and it has 3 different teams you can be on, and introduces an area movement mechanic. There are several other games that have been released since that are inspired by this one.

Rick and Morty Total Rickall – some of you are parasites, some are real people. The basic mode is a simple cooperative game, but the advanced mode is full-on social deduction. There’s a bunch of characters in the middle of the table and we need to decide who to shoot. When you shoot a “real person” your hand size goes down permanently.

If a 4th “real person” character is shot, the player (and therefore team) that shot that last real character loses. Players have a small hand of action cards, and they commit to their action simultaneously but get to select their target when their turn comes around. Player identities/allegiances can shift frequently. There’s no player elimination since we are shooting NPCs instead of each other.

My new game is called GROWL. Here your hand of cards determines if you are human or a werewolf. If you ever have 3 Bite cards you are turned into a werewolf. A Charm cancels a Bite, and there are also Salves, which cancel Wounds, etc. During the game you don’t play cards from your hand, you take the top (face-up) card from the middle of the table and publicly give it to someone. So we all get to see how players’ roles are slowly being influenced. When a Night card pops up, all players get to pass a card from their hand face-down to the left, and also a card from their hand face-down to the right. Players shuffle the two cards they receive from their neighbors, so if you get bitten you won’t know for sure which neighbor bit you. At the end of the third night all wolves start growling (yes, out loud!) and the goal for humans is to have at least one human left alive (and wolves of course want no humans left alive). Check it out if interested, on Kickstarter now!

Just like any fun genre of game, social deduction hidden roles games just keep evolving and each new design inspires others. Is there ONE ultimate game of this type? No, because like any infinite magisterium, beauty can be found in strange places. Each player might be seeking something different and every game on this list might be somebody’s favorite. So go explore this exciting new world of mysterious identities and wicked deceivers!

Rolling dice or shuffling cards is the gamer equivalent of summoning a demon of chaos. It’s a prayer for the cosmic intervention of an inexplicable dark force. The very act of rolling dice, and especially the ritualistic fervor that often accompanies it, is by definition a religious act. The origins of life remain a mystery, but the very nature of chaos itself creates the complex order we see everywhere. The rarest outlier molecular forms may be extremely statistically improbable, but once they happen to appear in the swampy swarm of this cauldron of chaos, they can beget complex forms through self-replication.

“Kyanite crystals” by User:Aelwyn – Self made picture. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The gamification of complex real-life tasks distills the unfathomable chaos of life into comprehensible order. A worker placement game allows us to understand correlations in systems such as farms or factories. Games are fun because we enjoy feeling like we can control the laws of physics like gravity and molecular forces. H.P Lovecraft called the discovery of your own insignificance “cosmic fear,” and it stalks us like a shadow whenever we stay up too late.

So why do most game designers introduce an element of randomness to their games?I would argue that dark mystical (or at least unknown) forces are a game designer’s ally because the introduction of chaos to a game causes our subconscious to be reminded of real life. Games are a simulacrum of life, but all the beautiful photo-realistic art and all the flavor text is still just fluff on top of the Spark that moves us emotionally. Understanding the Spark is the struggle of all artists: to know that there is unknowable, and to grasp at it in a comprehensive presentation. To recall a long-lost hidden truth, or cosmic memory. In his Exegesis, Philip K. Dick referred to this as “anamnesis,” which means “loss of forgetfulness.” (Of course, Dick had already gone partially insane when he wrote that book.)

WE RELATE TO GAMES BECAUSE THEY CONNECT US TO OURSELVES.

What makes a game fun is not the perfect marriage of theme and mechanics, or art and presentation. A lot of great games have bad mechanics (Talisman, Warhammer 40k). We play them because they excite something deeper within ourselves. Some games have a terrible theme (Chess) or no theme (Go), but we love them because it is the game Itself we struggle to unlock. The act of replaying these games is an exploration into the unknown. We seek a simulation of our complex universe in an effort to reduce it to an equation. Tic-Tac-Toe doesn’t hold our interest after childhood because we’ve solved it. It no longer reminds our subconscious of the world we inhabit. There is no chaos, no mystery.

Even games without dice often use the complexity of sociological impulses to add an element of the unknowable. When you cannot predict your opponent’s motivations, you struggle to understand them though their next move. Successfully out-maneuvering them feels like a victory because you have reduced something complex and unknown into a series of predictable components. This is the gamer version of quantum mechanics.

There’s a reason Chess has begun bore the popular imagination… as computers conquer champion chess-masters and Russia releases logs of millions of past games, we begin to realize that Chess is simply a game system, technically one that is solvable. Magnus Carlsen remains mysterious to us partly because his chess-master brain is more complex than most computers, and he has avoided playing Chess against computers possibly to maintain his own aura of mystery.

I think a very beautiful and ‘pure’ gaming experience is Conway’s Game of Life. You set up a simple equation at the beginning, and a few lines of code move dots around the screen until they disappear or equilibrium is reached. These dots are meant to emulate molecular interaction, or even living creatures, and watching them live out their “lives” and fail or thrive can be surprisingly entertaining–and scary, as growth rate curves come into effect and large populations suddenly vanish.

When you experiment with an infinity of formulas for the laws of physics, eventually you are bound to get some interesting – the “knife-edge” balance of our real-life universe. Cosmologist Martin Rees identifies a set of constants–six specific numbers–as “the deep forces that shape the universe.” These numbers include things like anti-gravitation forces, weak and strong nuclear forces, etc. Only in the chaos of the birthing of a universe (or possibly an infinity of universes) do we get the elegance of our laws of physics, what you might call the “sense” we make of the universe.

In other words, the mixing of utter randomness in the cauldron of chaos IS what creates matter, what creates order, what creates anything that we can view as meaningful. Anything less complex than utter chaos eventually reveals itself to be just another system.

So let’s embrace dice rolling, deck shuffling, hidden information, and mystery in games. It’s what our subconscious relates to anyway. It’s how we lose our forgetfulness and reconnect with hidden truths. It’s how we find ourselves. Anything less than that is just Tic-Tac-Toe.

With thanks to Peter Vaughan.

       Players start the game with a hand of cards that each perform a unique function. Each of the 10 planets holds caches of other cards, and you can land on them and drop off cards or take new cards.

Sounds pretty straight forward, right? If there were no objective at all then it would be a pretty useless game. So we add an objective, but a very distant one: Your goal is to have a particular card in your hand “The Ovoid” at the end of the game (when all players have finished their final turn). So now players have an end goal, but there’s still not a lot of information about what to do on your turn. In addition, let’s add a small constraint:

       Your hand limit is 7 cards.

Since all players are moving about the same board, now all of a sudden it matters which cards are left behind on which planets and when. You aren’t just managing your hand, you are also influencing the hands of your opponents and the cards they discover on each planet. Different players may want different cards, depending on their strategies, and that may naturally lead to players battling over cards and the envelopes that contain them. Players may begin to trade with each other. Players will begin to lie to each other about where certain cards are located. Since all players have the same goal, eventually conflict of some sort will develop, and it will develop totally differently based on how their personalities and strategies interact. This emergent gameplay leads to unique moments, and (for the thematically-minded players) unique stories. That’s emergent narrative, and, to me, it’s the basis for a great board game.

-Joey

Designer, Chaosmos

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/142830/chaosmos

-Joey

Powerful microscopes can stare deep into the embryo, revealing infinitesimally small swirling galaxies and nebulae, ready to burst forth.

Chaos is not the same thing as randomness. It’s easier to poison Ghengis Khan when he’s still a young soldier than it is to defeat his massive Mongol hordes 20 years later.

You can’t control very many aspects of Chaosmos simultaneously– if you find an inactive Trap, you can set it immediately, but of course that doesn’t really help you, it just prevents others from getting it. You can remember where it is and leave it there, but then someone else might end up using it against you. If you carry it with you, it has now become a part of your strategy… or it’s just filling up your hand.

Part of the mystery of the game is the tough choices you must make about what aspects of the game you want to control, and when.  Do you want to hold several planets at once using Bases? Do you want to lock off one planet with a Vault and hide the keys? Maybe you want to spend time controlling the enviro-gear, preventing the other players from going to particular planets. The whole while you will most likely need some weapons to protect yourself, and to find and take the Ovoid before the end of the game.

Cataleptic Fog and Temporal Displacer are the two most powerful cards in the game (other than the Ovoid). They cannot be recovered after use, so try to save them for the end game.

DON’T ACCIDENTALLY REVEAL CARDS. Open envelopes under the table, or turn them in such a way that the bottom card is not revealed to the players across from you. This is game about control of information, and information is far more powerful than weaponry.

Don’t use the same weapons too many times. Someone probably has already picked up the counter cards, and is planning a little surprise.

Don’t waste Hypertokens.

Your opponents’ enviro-gear become more valuable to them in the final turns.

Pay attention when it is not your turn. It shouldn’t feel like there is ever downtime between turns. The player who figures out what the other players are doing has a huge advantage.

Find the Ovoid. Don’t forget the goal of the game.

While the goal for the end of the game is to have The Ovoid, players may differ in their strategies during gameplay. Here are some different strategies a player might employ during the game. These strategies, other strategies, or a combination of strategies might be employed.

• Building up an arsenal of weapons, so as to be nearly unbeatable in combat. The idea here is to let others find and control The Ovoid, and then take it from them near the end of the game.

 

• Spores and Imps can be Nano Fabricated, like any other combat card.

 

• Gathering the Environment cards other players need to travel to certain planets, and stowing the cards on those planets, rendering it difficult for the other players to access them.  If the necessary Environment card is on the planet along with the Disguise Selector (a universal Environment card), then the player cannot access the planet at all, unless another player helps them get one of the cards needed to journey there.  [Therefore in a two-player game, such a strategy while controlling The Ovoid is a way to end the game prematurely, since the second player cannot access the planet to win it for himself or herself.]

• Setting up Vaults on planets to protect cards stored there. Anyone can lock a Vault, but only the player with the right Key can discard the locked Vault or take cards from an envelope protected by a Vault. In addition, players might save Keys they find in their journeys, in case they come across that color Vault. Or they might take an unlocked Vault and move it to a planet of their choosing. A player might even save an unimportant Key on their person as a red herring to fool other players into thinking the Key might be important. (See Vaults and Keys.)

• Protecting cards on a planet with one or more Traps. (See Traps.) Traps may be set in combination with a Vault, but an armed Trap always goes on top of a locked Vault.

• Using the Temporal Displacer card to end the game early or delay the game longer.

• Using Hyperspace cards or the Booster Rockets to avoid other players from engaging you in an Interstellar Space Battle (combat). (See Hyperspace, also Booster Rockets.)

• Squatting on a planet with strong resources, defending it against attackers. Cards in an envelope that a player controls cannot be accessed by the attacking player unless they win a battle (and therefore, control of the planetary envelope).

• Misleading other players by traveling to unimportant planets, or by holding onto unimportant Keys.

YOUR FIRST GAME: TIPS FOR BEGINNERS

Selecting a Secondary Planetary Envelope

Be sure to note which planet is ecologically unfriendly to yourself and your opponents. Also note where your home planet lies on the board–far away planets will be harder to explore without expending your precious Hypertokens.

Designing your opening hand

At the outset of the game you will have about 12 cards with which to create your hand and determine an opening strategy.

• Do your alien powers lean towards exploration, politics, warfare, etc? This might change your plan.

• Do your envelopes contain multiple Imps or multiple Spores? Those combine to create powerful weapons.

• Do you have a Vault or a Key or both? Did you start with the Ovoid? Perhaps you should carry these cards with you until you can find a planet to hide them on.

• Is there anything in the Cosmic Pool that you can use? Scrying Prisms let you peep other players’ hands or far-away unexplored planets.

• Do you have a Telethwarter?  This can be set as a trap, but it might be more valuable as a way to get you home quickly in the future to access the Cosmic Pool.

• Which planets are already explored? Which have not been explored yet? In a 4 player game, only 2 planets are unexplored at the beginning, and (since players start the game with an envelope and can reach a second on your first turn, that’s 8 of the 10 planets) quickly controlling a third planet will net you 10% more knowledge about the location of critical cards.

Good luck!