While working on a game of mine, I stumbled on a realization that made me rethink the design of hidden role games. As their name implies, hidden role games about having a role and hiding it. However, I realized that hiding your role is exactly as difficult as telling everyone your role.

Hiding Your Role

The typical hidden role game is about hiding your role. You get a secret card that says what team you’re on or what you’re trying to do, and you don’t want anyone else to know. However, there has to be a reason to keep it secret. In most games, the reason is because you’ll get punished in some way, usually either death or skipping a turn. In werewolf, if you get found out as a villager, you might get killed in the night, and if you get found out as a monster, you might get killed during the day. In spyfall, if you get found out as the spy your game is over immediately!

Claiming a Role

Another way to do it, though, is to encourage players to claim roles. Instead of prefering not to be seen, you can get players to want to be seen as whatever is advantageous at the time. This looks the same a lot of the time. After all, you want to claim to be a resistance member in the game resistance, right? But the key difference is that there isn’t punishment, only reward. For example, when you play resistance with plot cards, you really want to claim to be on the same team as someone to get those cards. In Secret Hitler, you want to encourage the president to pick you as chancellor so you get more power. This changes the game in small ways I want to look at.

Dialogue

There tends to be a lot more talking in claiming games. In claiming games, you are basically always claiming to be on the team of whoever is in charge right now (usually the player whose turn it is). Then, when power changes hands, so does your allegiance. Anything you said the turn before can be explained away as you trying to get that benefit, so it can be ignored. Meanwhile, hiding games keep everyone quiet. Since you could end up getting punished, you tend to not say much, just to have more control over when you do speak. Since the punishment for being caught is often losing power, it means you have even less ability to prove your innocence. This all compounds into itself, meaning eventually the slightest misspeak could mean your doom.

Tone

Because claiming games have a lot of talking and hiding games have a lot of silence, it means that the games end up with different tones. Claiming games get a little wacky. People are constantly lying and constantly talking and constantly contradicting themselves, making everything a little silly. Hiding games are scary and intense, since you can’t afford to show any sign of weakness. This means claiming games tend to make better party games and hiding games make better serious games.

Non-social players

One of the biggest issues with social deduction games of all types is that some players just aren’t great speakers. So do either of these types tend to help with this? You might expect hiding games to be better for them, since it encourages people to keep quiet and not have to say much, but I think it may be the opposite. Hiding games are so tense that little mistakes can be hard to come back from, especially if you aren’t great at convincing people. Claiming games aren’t necessarily better, but they do at least come at it from a different angle. There’s a lot more up-front talking, but at least the downside to not being very talkative is just not getting some benefits, rather than being kicked out of the game.

Conclusion

This is merely an analysis of current styles of games, not any sort of advice column, I just wanted to take a closer look at two ways of providing reasons for players to hide their intentions.