Game Design Log: Putting the Fun in Functional Game Mechanics

People play games to have fun. A concept that has caused me more headaches than any other while building my own games. The immediate issue is that “Fun” is an entirely subjective measurement. Some people will never have more fun than when solving a crossword puzzle, while others go cross eyed just looking at that giant, blank grid. Taunting them with its withheld answers and clever (or “clever”) wordplay. Even worse, if you’re like me you have been both of those people at different times, sometimes for the same puzzle. Trying to make everybody on Earth always have the most “Fun” playing your game is a path to true madness that I do not wish on you dear reader.

That is not to say that some games aren’t substantially more fun mechanically than others. I’ll be using the genre of hidden role games to explore this idea. Hidden role games are based on social deduction and deception, where the “Evil” player or players must accomplish some nefarious task, while not being uncovered by the “Good” team, who make up the majority of players. If you’ve ever played Mafia (sometimes called Werewolf) as a child, that is a bare bones version of a hidden role game. However, the most famous example these days is everyone’s favorite pandemic pastime turned meme, Among Us. But I’d rather talk about Avalon.

Avalon is my go to example of the ur-hidden role game, and I personally hate it. Disclaimer: this is a specific gripe with a specific mechanic. I bear no ill will towards the creator, publisher, or players of the game, and I know firsthand that the people who love this game really love this game. Both my wife, and my writing partner on Worldstate, absolutely love Avalon. Their board game group introduced me to it, and are the reason I have played so much of a game I do not like. Never forget the first point. Fun is subjective, and sometimes compromising to play a game you aren’t a fan of is worth being with your friends. And just because it isn’t my cup of tea doesn’t mean you also won’t enjoy Avalon, so don’t let this next section turn you off of it.

But anyways, on with the critique. Avalon has all the basic tenets that make hidden role games fun. A random smattering of players are the Evil team, known to one another, but not to the other players. They must work in secret to undermine the success of missions that small groups of players will go on. If the Good team can figure out who the Evil team are, they are almost certain to win. There are roughly twice as many Good players as there are Evil, so Good will always have the power to outvote Evil. This is where the hidden role game’s most distinguishing mechanic comes into play, the discussion phase. This is a turnless game phase where all the players can politely and calmly discuss who may or may not be on the Evil team. This is assuming it does not immediately devolve into a minutes-long shouting match of blind accusations. If you are Evil this phase is where you can make your case for innocence, and sow discord among the Good players. And if you are Good this is where you discuss who you believe to be Evil. This is what Avalon gets right, in a way that pretty much every hidden role game I have played since has emulated.

The reason I dislike Avalon is because, very often, some players are not able to participate in the rest of the game’s mechanics. Only a small subset of players get to go on each mission, contributing to its success or failure. This is so Good has some wiggle room in avoiding adding Evil players to these missions, which would result in a loss. With the number of players going on each subsequent mission being raised. But because the selection group is small, it is entirely possible to never go on a single mission throughout the course of a game. In fact in almost every game of Avalon I have played, at least one player is completely left out of this entire game phase.

What’s worse is that the best tactical way to play the game reinforces this pattern. If you had too much suspicion laid on you during the discussion (r.e. shouting) phase then letting you go on the mission is an objectively bad move for the Good team. If you actually were Evil, and you played your hand too early, it behooves your Evil compatriots to throw you under the bus in their attempt to seem Good. And if you are Good, and a particularly devious ploy from the Evil team has painted you as Evil, you are similarly left without allies. Once you have been branded this way, all other players are best served by ignoring you during the discussion phase, and with the overwhelming number of votes against you you’ll be excluded from missions as well. Sitting around for up to an hour, only nominally participating in a “Fun” activity in which you have little to no agency is a personal hell of mine. This is why Avalon holds my top spot for “Game I have had the least fun while playing.” Those rounds where I get branded as Evil right away, and then spend the rest of the time doing nothing, are terrible. Particularly when I was Good all along.

So let's look at some other examples from the genre, and see how other games have addressed the problems that I laid out. Games like Shadow Hunters and Cult of the Deep are a hybrid of hidden role and battle royale games. Players begin the game attacking one another with limited or zero knowledge of who is on their team, and must work to uncover who they are supposed to be fighting as the game goes on. This structure solves the problem of participation. Even if your role has been identified, correctly or incorrectly, you still get to attack another player on your turn. No one is relegated to the sidelines. Furthermore, Cult of the Deep has a mechanic where once you have died in the game you come back as a vengeful shade, less powerful than when you were alive, but still able to aid your teammates. This means even when you are “out” of the game you are still participating in relevant game actions until the game is fully over. Shadow Hunters solves for being found out in another way as well. Each character you can play has a unique power that (usually) requires you to publicly reveal your role to activate. This softens the consequences of being found out, and gives players the ability to prove what team they are on if they have been misidentified.

The One Night suite of games solve for participation by making the game itself incredibly short. So even if you get found out or killed, the time before you can jump back into the next round is only about 15 minutes anyways. Admittedly this doesn’t so much “solve” the issue of participation so much as it reduces it to being less of a problem. But still it is an improvement.

The board game rendition of The Thing is an interesting mixed bag, solving one issue while creating a whole new one. The Thing takes place in three rounds, and at the start of each round, new players can randomly become another of the titular Things. This creates a suspense much like the movie, where someone you knew for a certainty was your ally early on may now be your enemy. It also prevents the Good team from being able to exclude unknown players in favor of a proven Good player. Because that Good player is up for debate again each round. Ironically it is this mechanic that makes this my wife’s least favorite hidden role game. Her issue is that the randomness of the conversion removes an aspect of the fun that other hidden role games have. That of deducing who is and isn’t your ally. If the Evil player could convert others to their side, that’s a tool they can be caught using, increasing the strategic options on both sides. But the game randomly assigning new villains cheapens the fun of the deduction aspect of the game. Like when a whodunnit mystery withholds its clues until the finale, ensuring that the audience can’t have figured out the ending because they weren’t given relevant information. 

So how do we target and improve the “Fun” in our own game design? The easiest way to do that is to start building something that you personally find fun. Hopefully if you are building your own game this is a given, but it bears reminding yourself from time to time why it is you want to build games. It’s because you enjoy them. Next, you want to critically analyze the moments you have had fun or not had fun while playing a game. That is largely what I’ve done throughout this article. Third, and leading us to our end point. Is to iterate on and test out variations and new mechanics. This is the most tedious process, but also the best one to actually see what is and isn’t working. Let’s synthesize what we’ve learned from hidden role games and try to come up with our own hidden role mechanics. Spoiler alert, the game we’re about to describe already exists.

To start with I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, just refining its shape. So all I want to do is tweak and pull the rules of Avalon a little bit so the game is less exclusionary. Or at least so it feels less exclusionary. Games are much more about how they feel to play than any actual statistics, but that’s a topic for another article. Let’s start by messing with the Quest sizes. Since it feels unfun to be left out of the “in” group in a given game we can expand the number of players participating in the Quests. However we immediately hit a roadblock here, as if every player is allowed to participate in each quest, the Evil team will be able to fail every single one. So let’s reverse this, going down to only two participants in each Quest. Counterintuitively this tends to feel less exclusionary during gameplay, as being left out of a two person team is less personal than being left out of a five person team.

However, now if someone is confirmed Good, what is to stop them from being sent on every Quest? Since we have a smaller quest team, we can institute an additional rule to prevent this. No player may be sent on two Quests back to back. This directly forces players to shuffle who goes on which mission each round, as it would take four confirmed Good players to be able to fully exclude everyone else at the table, and that is a lot of people to be certain about in a game like this.

After a round of playtesting, you discover a new issue with smaller team sizes that Avalon did not have. With only two participants in a Quest, when that Quest fails it is still possible to exclude both players from the rest of the game, because you know one of them is Evil. But what if we took a note from The Thing? To achieve the level of obfuscation we’re looking for, the game must make players just a little uncertain at all times. But we don’t want to change a player’s allegiance partway through, as we already discussed how that can turn off hidden role enthusiasts. Instead let’s mess with the mechanic of Passing or Failing a Quest.

I haven’t discussed this in detail before now, so let’s do a quick overview. Every player going on a Quest in Avalon is handed a Pass and a Fail card, they turn one of those cards in as their answer to whether or not the intend the Quest to succeed, and discard the other. Both piles are shuffled while face down, so the information is hidden as to who turned in what card. The results are revealed and (generally speaking) the Quest fails if one of the turned in cards is a Fail. To modify this for obfuscation we can take a little bit of agency from the players. Let’s instead shuffle all of the Pass and Fail cards together in a single pile, and deal out a small number of cards, let’s say three, to the first player on the Quest. That player removes one of those cards, and then passes the remaining two to the second player on the Quest. That player then turns in one card to determine the outcome of the Quest.

If you’ve played the game we’re building you likely know where this is going by now, as this particular mechanic is a signature of the game. But let’s dissect this change a bit before the reveal. Because the three cards dealt are random, there is a chance all three are Pass or all three are Fail cards. Meaning the players on the Quest have the option to exclaim “I had no choice!” when a Quest is failed. It still throws suspicion onto them, but does not automatically mean they are Evil. Just as a side note, even more ingenious is having each player discard one card in sequence. Meaning the first player can say “I was dealt three Fails”, and the second player can claim “I was passed two Fails from Player One!” But Player One can also claim “I handed you one Pass and one Fail and you played the Fail.” The high number of possible scenarios as to why any given Quest Passes or Fails creates a lot more potential strategies and opportunities for both Good and Evil players. This isn’t really important to the point I’m making here, I just think it’s a slick mechanic.

The final change we are going to talk about here is the number of Quests being gone on. In Avalon there are only 5 Quests over the course of a game. This works well, as so much of the play group is going on each Quest that, in theory, there are more than enough Quests for everyone to participate in. In this new game, since there are only two players per Quest, in a ten person play group (a good size for this style of hidden role game), you would only get everyone on a Quest if there were no repeated players. So let’s massively increase the total number of Quests to be gone on. Rather than a set number, we can have a victory threshold. So if Good or Evil ever get a certain number of Quests Passed or Failed the game ends there. This means a lopsided game where Evil or Good are doing exceptionally well will end much faster than a tight game where both teams are getting Quests in their favor. A nice way to prevent an already won game from dragging on.

So now, we have a game where it is more likely that more players will get to go on a Quest throughout the course of gameplay. Where getting left out of a Quest doesn’t feel quite as bad. And where the number of Quests is malleable to the success of the two teams against one another. A game that solves for the issues I have with Avalon, and doesn’t create significant new problems in the process. And that game is called Secret Hitler. My personal favorite hidden role game, and a game I have personally never had the sort of unfun nights with as I have with Avalon. I particularly like this comparison, as the mechanics of each game are so similar that their differences are easy to highlight. Also because Secret Hitler came out four years after Avalon, and if the developers of that game weren’t directly influenced by Avalon, or at least its origin The Resistance, I would be surprised.

Does that mean Secret Hitler is a better game than Avalon? No. Like all games it has its own issues. I think Avalon has better replayability and better options to customize gameplay through the different optional characters. Adding Percival, Morganna, and Mordred will drastically change the game’s balance and win conditions. I also know that my Avalon loving friends are way more into hidden role games than I am in general, so maybe it’s a finer grade of gamer cocaine for the real fiends out there. There’s also a whole host of differences between the two that I didn’t even touch in this article, like Secret hitler forcing the Active Player to be the President, while Avalon does not require them to go on Quests. And any one of those changes could be what makes or breaks your particular idea of Fun. For my game nights though, I am much more likely to pull Secret Hitler off the shelf since I know I won’t have a bad time at the hands of the game’s mechanics. 

Hopefully this remarkably lengthy article helped you look at game design a different way. And hopefully I didn’t come off too negative on Avalon. Seriously I don’t think it’s a bad game, there’s a reason it has lasted over a decade. But that’s all for this week, join me next week when I spend too many words talking about some other niche bit of game design.