Social deduction game
A social deduction game is a game in which players attempt to uncover each other’s hidden role or team allegiance.[1] Commonly, these games are played with teams, with one team being considered “good” and another being “bad.”[2] During gameplay, players can use logic and deductive reasoning to try to deduce one another's roles, while other players can bluff to keep players from suspecting them.
Examples of social deduction games include Mafia, in which only the mafia know who is mafia and what the mafia players' roles are, Bang!, in which only the sheriff's role is known to everyone, and Secret Hitler, in which only the fascists know who the fascists are.[3] Other social deduction games include The Resistance: Avalon, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Coup, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Dracula's Feast, The Chameleon, Two Rooms and a Boom, Spyfall 2, Love Letter, Witch Hunt, and Crossfire.
One important element of strategy in some social deduction games is determining how long to stick to one's story in the light of information obtained from other players.[4] A Monte Carlo tree search has been suggested for making decisions in social deduction games, like The Resistance: Avalon.[5]
Notable games
References
- Engelstein, Geoffrey; Shalev, Isaac (2020). Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis Group. p. 220. ISBN 978-1-138-36549-0.
- Farber, Matthew (2020). Global Perspectives on Gameful and Playful Teaching and Learning. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. p. 6. ISBN 9781799820154.
- Engel Bromwich, Jonah (5 September 2017). "Secret Hitler, a Game That Simulates Fascism's Rise, Becomes a Hit". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 March 2020.
- Eger, Markus; Martens, Chris (2018-09-25). "Keeping the Story Straight: A Comparison of Commitment Strategies for a Social Deduction Game". Fourteenth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference.
- Cowling, Peter I.; Whitehouse, Daniel; Powley, Edward J. (2015-08-02). "Emergent bluffing and inference with Monte Carlo Tree Search". 2015 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG): 114–121. doi:10.1109/CIG.2015.7317927. ISBN 978-1-4799-8622-4.
- Casey, Matt M. "What deduction games like Werewolf tell us about ourselves". Boing Boing. Retrieved 28 March 2020.