A collection of deceptively simple social games, played in the browser. You can sign up for The Social Game, and it will be publicly available this summer.
The Social Game began as a Covid project called Pecking Order. See the full story here.
Good games are story-generating machines. And the most powerful stories in games are not the ones scripted by writers.
Pecking Order is such a unique experience that people began inviting their friends to test it, their friends invited more friends, and our test server grew organically in ways we never expected. We realized that ultimately the game would need to evolve into a website. Fortunately, many of us already work in software, and we have the skills to build it. We gradually realized that we were in a unique position to build something that felt genuinely new.
Pecking Order is a social deduction game, so we are developing it in a highly collaborative way. I had some core ideas nailed down, but was struggling to realize those ideas in a prototype. I brought in a group of friends who are a mix of experienced designers/testers, and game fans who have zero design experience.
As we’ve said before, Survivor is the best game show of all time. But it is also 40 seasons long. So where do you start? Which seasons are best? Do you need to watch it in order? This guide is a systematic way to get you started with Survivor, help you avoid the bad seasons, and make sure that you don’t get spoiled on the best seasons by watching in the wrong order.
We have spent 3+ years developing our first board game Beast Master. Part of the reason it has taken so long is that we fumbled around in the dark for the first couple years designing without any constraints or any particular goal in mind. A cool, divergent idea would come up and we had no grounds to say, “no, that’s too far fetched,” or, “that’s simply not what we’re aiming for here.” We ended up accidentally re-designing it into a completely different game more than once. We eventually landed on a game that both of us are proud of, but we spent lots of unnecessary time banging our heads against the wall.
Since then, we’ve started explicitly writing up two things that shape the development of our games: Spine and Constraints. These crucially important concepts provide a huge amount of clarity and focus for us, and give shape projects before we even start prototyping them.
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.
