Hidden Role Games are some of my favorite games, and the genre as a whole is one I have great affinity for. I love how it uses players and player interaction as a tool for randomization, and the amount of staredowns it can make lead to amazing stories. But there have been issues with the genre for about as long as it’s been around. Various games have thought up different solutions, and some have tried to innovate, but few have solved more than one or two at a time. So I’ll be going over six of them over two articles. Let’s start with the more mechanically-focused ones.

Bug #1: Plausible Deniability

Hidden role games are about every player trying to succeed at some major goal while some subset of players are secretly trying to succeed at something else, or perhaps just hindering the main goal. So one of the big questions is how do you let players hinder the goal? If you are all trying to play cards that add up to 10, then the good players will play high numbers and the bad players would play low numbers. But then as soon as a player plays a 1 or 2, they immediately get pinned as a traitor! So how do you let players play a bad card and not have players suspect them? By giving them plausible deniability. If each player draws 3 cards then plays one, then a player can play a 2 and pretend it was their best card when it was really the worst.

The issues here pop up almost immediately. The first is that every excuse is the same. If there was only one way for things to go wrong, then the traitors only have one way to lie. They get no real choices to make. Second, if that actually happens to a safe player, they have no way to differentiate themself from a traitor. Both have the exact same excuse. It’s just down to who’s the better liar, which is tested fine enough in the game otherwise, it doesn’t need to be the only thing separating good from bad here.

The most common solution is A) to keep the information hidden as long as possible and B) allow other players to disrupt. Resistance does a good job at this. If a mission fails, there is only one player responsible for it, but each player can say something different about how they think it happened. Since the information is revealed after cards are drawn, after they’re played, and after they’re shuffled, there’s a lot of room for misdirection. Compare this to Secret Hitler, where there is no delay between a card being chosen and it being revealed, so there’s no room to lie or misdirect.

Bug #2: Double Setup

A lot of people describe hidden role games as a sort of meta-game. Effectively all players are playing a co-op game, it’s just that some players want the rest to lose that co-op game. In fact, I’ve seen a lot of would-be co-op games that use hidden roles to turn it into what some people call a semi-co-op game. While I have some opinions about that, that’s not what this article is about. Instead I’d like to focus on the game within a game aspect. It’s annoying.

When you set up a co-op game, you have to do a normal setup as with any game. Give each player their pieces, put all the things on the board, deal out cards, etc. In co-op games especially, this can get pretty intense, as there need to be systems that react with players since there aren’t player-controlled opponents. So now, after setting all this up, you also have to set up a second game, which can involve anything from shuffling up loyalty cards and dealing them out to an entire second set of tools. Even in the first situation where it’s just a single card per player, this can lead to easily misplacing your card, having to refer back to it at unknown times, and keeping it from being seen despite having multiple other things to track. This can lead to a huge disconnect in the game, since the hidden role is simultaneously incredibly important to be aware of the whole game, but also takes up no board space and is never put into play, but also is something that you have to pay attention to.

Some games get around this by just not having a metagame. Resistance still has some of this issue; I’ve seen plenty of games where people lose their loyalty card but remember who they were because it’s so central to the game. If there weren’t spies and resistance, the base game would be an absolute bore. More complex games like Dead of Winter, Shadows Over Camelot, and Battlestar Galactica have more problems with this, making the player loyalty effects really just feel tacked on to make the game not have the normal issues of a co-op. One of my games, Shoot the Messenger, is practically built around negating this issue. Like resistance the loyalty is baked right into the core game, but unlike resistance there aren’t separate cards that you have to keep looking back at or keep hidden. It’s all right there in the game.

Bug #3: Win Conditions

If you ask a player what the point of a hidden role game is, they’ll probably tell you that it’s right there in the name: you have to figure out what people’s roles are. While agreeing with players’ assumptions is not always right, meeting their expectations is something to be mindful of. Looking at the genre, they’re not far off. Some games explicitly state it as the win condition (with minor tweaks) such as Spyfall and Fake Artist. Resistance has it as practically a necessity, since the final mission at most play counts needs all players other than the traitors on a single team without any sabotages. But this is not a great fit for bigger games, and that’s where an issue arises.

Some hidden role games want to be complex. This has it’s advantages, since it allows more opportunities to subtly and secretly influence the game other than once-per-turn big actions like in the examples listed above. But this leads to an awkward situation. What happens when you find the traitor? If the game has lots of resources, different areas on the board, different things to track, then all the sudden finding the traitor seems anticlimactic. There’s already so much going on. If you find the traitor, ending the game right there seems wrong, since there’s so much more to do. But if you di find them out, then they either keep playing normally and you just have to annoyingly keep an eye on them, or they get killed/imprisoned and now the player just has to sit back and hope they’ve done enough damage. Neither of those options is particularly great.

Battlestar Galactica tries to solve this by giving the traitor new tools. If they get found out, they’re killed, but respawn somewhere that lets them mess with stuff, but not as well as they could have if they hadn’t been found out. It’s a punishment, but not a harsh enough one to make the game unfun for them, just enough to make them try to avoid it. My game, Shoot the Messenger, is still trying to figure this out. I tried just letting players vote to decide who loses, but it can sometimes lead to games where the traitor plays well but loses just to random voting. I tried scoring it as well, but then players felt like all the work they put in to discovering the traitor felt useless.

Conclusion (For Now)

When you design a hidden role game, keep these in mind. You don’t have to solve all of them, and some might argue they aren’t problems at all, but I would suggest you at least look at your game from these perspectives and see if there’s anything you can do about them. I’ll be back later to cover some more player-centric issues.