Something I’ve noticed some of my colleagues (and myslef) when designing hidden role or any other type of bluffing games is the grand fear of perfect information. However, I don’t think it’s quite as scary as it sounds

The Fear

When someone says perfect information, what they mean is something where there is no doubt involved. If two players play face-down cards, then shuffle them together, looking at one gives you some information on what one of them might have played. Looking at both gives you even more information, but you wouldn’t call it perfect, even though you’ve seen every card played. If, however, you don’t shuffle the deck beforehand, you could more comfortably call it perfect information.

What scares most designers is that it, in theory, removes all of the bluffing. If a player immediately looks at what you’ve done, then you aren’t really able to hide anything. If you can’t hide anything, then you’re not really bluffing, are you? Another issue is that perfect information begets perfect information. If I know who played one card, then I know who played the card before it, and so on. This means that unless everything is imperfect, then none of it is.

Trust

However, if a player does have perfect information, there’s one big caveat: they are one person. If one person has perfect information, they might not be able to do anything with it. Sure, if the game is designed a certain way, maybe they can, but that’s just as easy a thing to adjust as removing perfect information. If a player has perfect information, even of something vital, like having seen a player’s alignment, they are not immediately breaking the game just by knowing it. Even long chains of one person trusting another who trusts another can easily be broken at either end of the chain. Think of it like this: if player one receives perfect information on player two, then player two can no longer bluff player one, but BOTH of them can bluff players 3-whatever. If player one hadn’t received perfect information, they wouldn’t be bluffing, they’d just be guessing. Giving player more information gives them more choice.

Choice

Speaking of choice, if you remember some of my earlier articles, let players do the work for you! If a player does something that give away perfect information, let them! Maybe it’ll give them a push in some other way to win the game. For example, in my game Shoot the Messenger, you are totally allowed to give away your card that says “I am the bad guy.” Why would you want to do that? Well, because you’re going to have to do it eventually, and if you don’t shoot it, it’ll give you more bullets to use elsewhere. It can also be a learning experience. If you let players give away information, then you’ll teach them to be more secretive in the long game, or in other games altogether.

Execution

If you have perfect information, or even if every player has perfect information, the game still isn’t over (probably). There may be an entire other half of the game to play! In saboteur, for example, it can be pretty easy to figure out who the saboteur is, and often the saboteur will admit it. The hope is just that by the time this happens the players have been sabotaged enough. Or maybe a single player with perfect information has to use their information to make an impact on the game, but their information is just useless enough that they have to put a lot of work into utilizing it. The classic “give someone a gun but make them find a bullet.”

Conclusion

So as you can see, perfect information is fine in many circumstances. If your game is about more than just information, but also about trust, about choice, or just have some sort of goal that needs to be executed, you’ll be fine. Give players more information to work with, then test your game and see if it became too easy. For you it might be, since you’re the designer, but once there are multiple players, most of them new and none of them the same, you might be surprised.