Posted July 15, 2022 by Zivan
You should design a bluffing game for your friends. Why? Because you don't really have to do anything. The fun is embedded in the social interactions between the players, you only need to bring them into a situation where bluffing might be beneficial. It's designing itself!
I would start from the basics and work my up: quantum physics, classical physics, organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, psychology, game design, philosophy. However, as I am short on time, I will constrain myself to just game design.
Design implies we're doing something to reach a specific purpose. In this case, make a bluffing game. But what makes a bluffing game a bluffing game? For that matter, what is a game? I like Jane McGonigal's definition because of its simplicity: when stripped of everything else, all games have four things in common: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The most fun part of any game is the feedback system. That is, doing something and seeing the result. (Of course, I am assuming you want to make a fun game.) It's no fun having a goal, such as saving the princess, the fun is actually saving her--and getting a kiss! (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)⁄ It's no fun to be unable to touch goombas, but it's fun to evade and stomp them. So what do you do in bluffing games? You manipulate trust. In a bluffing game, the person with the best bluffing (trust manipulation) skills should win.
Alright then, let me try to follow that definition to illustrate the ideal of a bluffing game. First, I will be concrete with a few famous games in mind (try and guess them!), then I will try to abstract it for generalization purposes.
| Goal | Rules | Feedback system | |
| #1 | Occupy territory | Everyone negotiates; then separately writes down their orders for their armies, whoever has 12 victory points, wins. | Seeing whether the player held true to their word between negotiating and ordering their troops. |
| #2 | Avoid having four of the same card | Pass a card from your hand, face-down to another player and tell them what it is; they either call you out, accept, or pass it on; if they call you out, either you lied and you have to keep the card, or they were wrong in accusing you, and they have to keep the card; passing it on, they look at it and pass it on to a player who hasn't seen it, telling them what it is and so on | Seeing whether the player was telling the truth about the card |
| #3 | Occupy territory | The player rolls two dice and moves fields equal to the number on the dice; when they step on a field they can buy the field; if it is already bought, they must pay the owner a fixed rate | Seeing how your money grows or shrinks. |
| #4 | Get the pot | Each player gets two cards; and three shared cards are revealed; all players bet on their hand, raising their bets, matching others, or dropping out; every turn another shared card is revealed; when all five are revealed, the players show their hands, and they are ranked based on the statistical chance of that combination appearing | Seeing whether your hand was the strongest, and seeing whether the betting of the other players matched the strength of their hand. |
Now here's my abstraction.
Goal: get some limited resource, or avoid a fatal one which must be distributed
Rules: players interact with each other to get that limited resource (or avoid being given the fatal resource), there can only be one winner, and some hidden information exists
Feedback system: success in bluffing or telling truth; see whether other players were bluffing or not; and this informs your subsequent interactions
As you can see from my forced simplifications of these four games, on the surface they have different goals and rules, but the feedback system generally works the same. Perceptive readers will have noticed one is not like the others in that fundamental way. The games are diplomacy, cockroach poker, monopoly, and texas hold 'em poker. I avoid capitalizing and italicizing to avoid the names being eye-catching if anyone wants to actually guess (did anyone try?).
Of course, the rules are important, but only insofar as they create a situation and leave room to let the complexity of human interaction unfold. Therefore, they needn't be complex. One could imagine a game where the goal is to avoid going to zero points; the rules are that players start with 10 points, one of them flips a coin, looks at the result and tells the others what it is, the others call the coin-flipper out or not, if the player lied they lose a point if they didn't the wrongful accuser loses a point. I can imagine a group of friends having fun playing that game to pass the time. Of course, this lacks some crucial aspects and even though it might be conceivably tagged as a bluffing game, it's actually more of a guessing game.
In that example, there's too little complexity within those rules to allow for true bluffing. I think the quintessential rule of a good bluffing game makes bluffing consequential. That is, one interaction should influence the next. As I said, bluffing games are essentially trust manipulation activities, as opposed to just deception activities. You are both trying to increase and decrease trust depending on circumstances, but that only happens if the individual interactions are connected somehow. Take Diplomacy, for example, where lying one time will change your relationship with another player for the rest of the game. They might have caused you a huge loss. You won't just be frustrated but also start to question their integrity and ulterior motives. You all know there's just one possible winner, but perhaps you thought their strategy was trying to take some other territory, and you weren't in direct conflict. Now with this new information of them double-crossing you for some other gain, you adjust your mental model of their goal. On the other hand, if you are only lying the whole time, nobody will ever trust you, which will make it impossible to win the game. So you are sometimes truthful and sometimes less so. The question of when to be or not to be truthful is the art of the bluffing game.
So, here are some questions you can try and answer while making your own bluffing game.
I was, of course, underselling the difficulty of designing such a game. If I added the part about how I tried to implement these insights in the design of Ragusa Trade 'Em, this post would be really long, so I'm going to end it here. I'll write the Ragusa Trade 'Em post soon!
The biggest bluff I pulled was writing this post with complete authority. It is, of course, my opinion. Perhaps I've ignored a glaringly obvious problem in bluffing game design. Please leave a comment with your thoughts and opinions!
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