Bluffing is one of my favorite mechanics in board gaming. I love trying to convince people of things (is that why I have a blog?) and I like that it lets me trick people in a safe and agreed upon manner. But there’s a lot of different ways to include bluffing in a game. Let’s take a look at some.

Every Game has Bluffing

In a sense, you can bluff with any game, or at least any game with hidden information. There are very few games without hidden information, though, so it’s basically every game. If you have a single card in your hand, or know a single thing your opponent doesn’t, you can bluff about it. However, it doesn’t really make a game a bluffing game. Some games ask you to do it, and other games don’t even mention it. It’s usually dependent on your play group as to whether or not it’s even allowed. Poker, perhaps the most famous bluffing game, is technically a game of this level. Nowhere in the rules does it say you are forced to bluff. Your punishment for bluffing is only what you choose for it to be, and your opponent’s benefit for not falling for it is whatever you risked. There’s nothing official there.

Explicit Optional Bluffing

However, there are some games that specifically give you the option to lie. They will ask a player to say somethign out loud, or to take an action that will fail if you have done it the wrong way. In either situation, another player will be given the option to call you out. If they are wrong, they get punished, if they were right, you get punished, often the exact same punishment. These types of games are very common, since the lying is always optional. Because of the divisiveness of the mechanic, some players would rather just play it safe and never lie, even if it puts them at a disadvantage. It’s also fairly self-balancing, since players who tend to lie more are going to be caught more because of it. The issue with this type of game is that you end up geting a lot of similar games with the same players, and very difficult games with unfamiliar players. If you’re playing with people you don’t know, you don’t get the advantages that may feel necessary for balancing purposes. If you’re playing with your friends, you already know who you’re going to call out before the game starts.

Forced Bluffing

Every so often games will force players to lie. Sometimes only on a technicality, such as with hidden role games. The game will tell you to try and blend in, but it never tells you you can’t tell the truth about your role. It would just be bad to do it. Some games are more explicit. They will have you a card and force you to pretend it is another card. Inhuman Conditions, for example, forces you to lie about being a human if you were dealt a robot card. In Sheriff of Nottingham you are forced to lie if you only have contraband in your hand. These kinds of games can be fun ways to force players to adapt. Players don’t get to take the easy way out, and victories can be that much sweeter when you aren’t expecting them. However, the big issue with this is it takes a choice out of the players’ hands. As mentioned, some players like lying and some hate it, and while forcing them out of their roles may be enlightening, it may not be super fun to some of them.

Can’t Get Caught

A strange thing in some games, often hidden role variants, is the idea that you can’t get caught. Some people consider this a necessity for a true bluffing game, but I disagree. To clarify, I’m referring to the concept of specifically forcing a player into revealing whether or not they are telling the truth. This is a little different from “calling a bluff,” since that will happen no matter what at some point, and can be less direct, such as in poker. No, the difference here is that there is some sort of permanent change to the game when it happens. If you call BS on a player, they must reveal what they’ve done, and be punished. Since they’ve been called out, they need to somehow change their position in the game, since otherwise you could just continually call them out. This is why you don’t see this in hidden role games: if you have a role, you’ll have to keep it the whole game, so getting it confirmed kind of ruins the game. But some other games do it as well. If you think a player is lying, you don’t get to specifically say “I think you’re lying” and get rewarded, you just have to play around it. I think this leads to a lot of fun gameplay, since it isn’t a single solution to eveyr type of lie. You have to actually think about how they’re lying. This is something I made sure to focus on in my game The Scoop.

Timing

Another seemingly minor aspect of bluffing games is not just whether or not the bluffing is necessary, or the calling out is available, but also when. In Sherriff of Nottingham and Cockroach Poker, for example, there are very specific and locked moment in the game that you need to bluff / catch a bluff. How does this change the dynamic when compared to the “anybody can catch anybody at any time” of games like Coup and BS? The most obvious benefit is speed. You no longer have to wait for every player to say yes or scrutinize the active player. You just have to do it once. It keeps things moving. It also splits the difference a bit between forcing and allowing players to bluff. The player who only has one option to call the player out has to do it right then and there, so they are forced to make a decisions there, but then get to relax for the rest of the game. I think more games might benefit from including something like this in their game.

Conclusion

Okay, this one kind of got away from me. What can I say, I love the mechanic? I also realized as I started writing that there’s not so much different types of bluffing as there is different aspects of bluffing. You can sort of mix and match them to get different results. If you’ve got a bluffing game that isn’t quite working, think about switching some of this stuff around.