Forks Designer Diary 1: Choices

Forks started out as a social deduction game. It’s moved away from that in its various iterations, but the first idea, borne from playing a lot of resistance, was one of shared problems in which you need to work out who you can trust. At it’s most basic:

Begin with 32 cards, ranging from -8 to +8

Draw 3 cards keep 1, pass 2 to any other player.

That player keeps one and discards the other.

A tracker in the center records the total value of cards discarded. If total is negative the bad guys win, otherwise the good guys win.

Immediately there are a couple of issues with this. Whilst in theory this allows for deductive logic- Give someone a negative and a positive and you’ll know from which they discard which team they’re on (unless it’s a bluff); in real life it falls down in a fair few places:

Well actually one place really- where are the choices?

You’re good? Keep the lowest value card and pass /discard the others.

Bad? Do the opposite.

The only choices come from choosing who to trust, which players have little information about to begin with, and really players only need to trust one other player.

And a game without interesting choices is not much of a game.

So instead it became a semi-coop. Whoever kept the highest value cards won if the discarded total was positive, otherwise only the bad guy(s) won. In this case, with an added incentive for players to keep the high value cards, fewer baddies were needed to even things out. But this still has problems:

Are there really interesting choices for the baddies here? If every player is now wanting high value cards, what’s to differentiate the baddies from the goodies in how they play? And, more importantly, the semi-coop problem:

If players aren’t going to win, what’s to stop them throwing the game to the bad guys?

I’ve found this is a key issue for many semi-coops, and have never seen a solution I’m 100% satisfied with. I play games with loads of different people with different views, and the question of is it okay to sink a game you’re losing just so someone else doesn’t win is still unanswered. There have been 100+page threads on forums about it, and it’s not something I want here. The fix: give people a legitimate reason why they want the value to be negative, make it a possible way to win outside of being on the bad team.

Now, if the final discarded score was negative, players with the lowest possible score won. This turned out to be a really elegant solution, but it meant one thing- there was no use in the traitor anymore. Now players could switch allegiance depending upon which cards they had, in fact it didn’t really make sense to think of them as teams or allegiances anymore. The choices of what to do were never obvious and always impactful. And so, the game was no longer Social Deduction.

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