Why we are making a social game
During the pandemic, it has been hard to test board games, so we started developing Pecking Order: a cut throat social game you play in Discord or Slack over the course of a week. This idea has been simmering for years as I fell deeply in love with two social games: Survivor and Codenames.
These are two very different games that both beautifully illustrate something we want to emulate: communication is the core gameplay, and there’s tremendous freedom in how players communicate. Communication is improvisational, relational, idiosyncratic, and creative. Communication can be radically different depending on the participants and the context. Communication as a game mechanism brings pre-existing human factors to the game, and offers a massive space of possibility for players to devise strategies and styles. And as a result, good social games reward creativity, and vary massively depending on who is playing.
Survivor
Survivor is a brilliant social game masquerading as Reality TV. Survivor just might be the best game show of all time (tied with Jeopardy, the perfect quiz show). I have so much to say about Survivor, and am working on a Survivor Redux guide for people who want to experience the very best of its 40 seasons without slogging through all of them. But for today, let’s just focus on one aspect of Survivor that inspired us.
Survivor has simple rules, and extreme variability in gameplay because it is a pure social game. The rules of the game are straightforward:
Don’t get voted out by your tribemates.
Compete in puzzles and obstacle courses to get immunity from votes.
Remain likable enough to impress a jury of losers to win the game.
Lurking behind those simple objectives is communication. Players have to persuade, cajole, coordinate with, and even trust their opponents to get anything done, and ultimately to win. It makes for excellent television because the victory condition is so brutally simple that it forces your attention onto the social acrobatics, genuine relationships, and tedious lying that people will do to persuade the group to not send them home.
Survivor is a fundamentally different game depending on who is playing. It’s a different game when there are returning contestants whose strategy from previous seasons is well known to the other contestants. It’s a different game when all the players have studied 30+ seasons’ worth of strategy before competing themselves. It’s a different game when players compete against their family members. It’s a different game when the final jury appreciates clever deception more than loyalty.
The immense variability of Survivor’s gameplay and its deep, robust, ever-evolving strategy is a credit to its simple rules and its focus on communication.
Codenames
Codenames is a word game that depends on strategic communication. It is not a pure social game like Surivor, but it illustrates the same concept.
The main gameplay loop is deceptively difficult. The clue-giver must see some conceptual relationship between two or more of the words on the table (while avoiding other words), then communicate that relationship to the guessers with a one-word clue. It's a damn brainteaser to come up with a good clue that triggers your teammates to recognize the conceptual relationship so they can choose the right words. Simple rules, and an extremely large space of possible clues reward players for creative communication.
The social component of Codenames is not an afterthought. The victory condition actually depends on this brilliant and challenging bit of improvised communication. Gameplay is quite different depending on who is playing. You might give very different clues while playing with strangers at the game store vs. playing with your closest friends and family members, with whom you can draw on shared experiences and inside jokes. In a real sense, you're playing with different stuff in these two scenarios.
Pecking Order
Our goal is to build a game with simple rules and varied gameplay. We want to make a pure social game that can be played 1,000 different ways, and rewards creativity. We want to make a game that depends on communication, and evolves when the same group of people play it over and over.
We’re currently testing the game in our Discord Server and we’re really loving it. You’re welcome to join for a future round if you’d like to give it a try!