Decoys

Decoys is a game about deception and perception, a stealth strategy board game about hiding in plain sight. This post is dedicated to the why and how of Decoys. At the end, you'll find a formalized rule-set of the core mechanics, allowing you to play it in its purest form.


Why?

It was the week I put down my nearly 17 year old dog. I was tired of banging my head against Clepto's many bugs. I knew I wasn't a good enough programmer to build the digital proof-of-concept. I had a choice: do I step up my coding skills by studying? or do I put the entire project on hold to work on something new, something that I have the skills for right now? GDC was only 4 months away and I knew I needed a finished game to prove myself. I decided on the latter. Clepto would just have to wait.

My professor at Raritan Valley, William Crosbie, always stressed the importance of board and card games in terms of actual design skill, so I knew that was the way to go if I'm a weak programmer. I had just finished Arkane Studios' Dishonored for the third time, so stealth and emergence was on my mind. So how about a stealth board game?

But what would a stealth board game be? At first, I assumed that stealth is inherently spacial. I thought of all the stealth games I've played, and they were all 3D video games where you would be worried about line of sight.

But then I thought about poker. Many of the game design academia I've read uses poker as an example of "social stealth" -  that is, hiding your emotions from another player. And I thought about the Hitman series which, while still a 3D video game, is more about hiding in plain sight than my traditional understanding of stealth. I came to the conclusion that stealth is about manipulating perceptions. Whether it's line of sight, plain sight, or emotions, stealth is about getting into your opponent's head and acting in a way to undermine their perceptions.

Hitman gave me a hook to start with; rather than physically hide players' pieces from one another, the pieces would all be in the same game space and be indistinguishable in terms of their role. From here I came up with the idea of one piece being a spy that carried out important actions while having a few other pieces be used as decoys to hide the spy piece's role.

This immediately reminded me of Chris Hecker's Spy Party which I've read articles on, except that instead of one player acting as the spy (trying to blend into the artificial crowd) and one player acting as the hunter (observing the crowd trying to pick out the human opponent), both players would take on both roles at once. And instead of computer controlled characters, the crowd is made up of the players' game pieces.

I considered giving each piece a different role, directly referencing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I haven't seen the film, but the title is what inspired me. I thought of having four different pieces on each team, one for each role named in the films title. The Spy would be the most important, capturing objectives on the board that would win the game. The Soldier would be the only piece that could attack an opponent's piece, it would be used primarily to stop the Spy from completing objectives. While 'Spy' and 'Soldier' have obvious mechanical equivalents in a stealth board game, 'Tailor' and 'Tinker' do not. I figured the Tailor would be about disguises, and a mechanical equivalent could be choosing a new role for a piece or switching two pieces' places. I assumed the Tinker would be something that could sabotage the opponent in some way, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

It wasn't long after pondering this that I decided four pieces were too much, and I could combine all of those other abilities into the one Spy piece. I decided there would just be three pieces, one chosen to be the all-important Spy who can achieve all winning conditions, while the other two pieces are Decoys, used for nothing more than tricking their opponent into thinking they are the Spy.

With the Spy a player can complete objectives and reach an exit, being the first to do so will win you the game. To keep players from ignoring their Decoys and simply moving their Spy from objective to objective, the Spy can also be used to attack opponent's pieces. If your Spy is attacked, you lose. This creates a risk/reward challenge; much like Spy Party, taking a critical route with your Spy from objective to objective will make it obvious that that piece is your Spy, and will surely draw attention from your opponent who will win the game by attacking you. But you can't just take your time, creating elaborate facades of your intentions, as your opponent may be taking a more critical path and complete their objectives before you can figure out which piece is their Spy. And the 1 in 3 odds of guessing your opponent's Spy is just enough to make it interesting

It's a delicious balance of deception and perception, in theory. I just needed to lay down some concrete rules so I could test it.

How?

I assumed I would use a conventional square grid board but was unsure what size to make it. It needed to be small enough that a conspicuous move could be immediately punished by an observant player, but large enough to allow breathing room between pieces so they would be easier to keep track of. I figured since there were three pieces per team, there would be three sets of objectives. That meant nine different objective points marked on the board. So the board would have to be sized to evenly space nine objectives, player's starting squares, and an exit. So I chose a nine by nine square grid board with an extra square on the edge to be the exit.

I struggled with the layout. Originally, players started at opposite sides, the exit was on a third side, and objective points were strewn about in the middle of the board and on the side opposite the exit. But this just made the game chaotic, with all the pieces generally staying within 4x6 block until one player moved their Spy from some point on the board to the exit, resulting in a confused and bitter-sweet victory. I spent a week coming up with different layouts, but none of them promoted a real flow to movement. The board I ended up on starts both players at opposite ends of the same side with the exit between them and the objectives in a 3x3 formation taking up most of the board. Coupled with having one of each objective in every row, this creates flow to player movement that goes from one end of the board and back. This is less chaotic, and makes keeping track of pieces easier.

With three sets of objectives, players would have to chose which ones to capture. So when a player picks their Spy, they also pick a set of objectives to capture. I chose a simple way to distinguish between these objectives, giving each set of three a number 1, 2, or 3. For honesty's sake, player's will have to write down which piece is their Spy and which set of objectives they will be capturing on a piece of paper at the beginning of the game.

My answer to movement was a total shot in the dark. I took a guess about how to handle controlling three separate pieces, making it resource based like the 'action point' mechanic found in other games. It turns out it fits perfectly. By having a limited number of combined spaces that your pieces can move per turn, each point must be spent carefully in order to execute strategies, and thus a great emphasis is conveyed through each move. This will challenge both players on opposite levels; the player moving exercises their deceptive skills while the other player exercises their perceptive skills.

I was unsure how players could secretly complete objectives while their opponent is watching their every move and can see all the objective points on the board. The actual capturing would have to be subtle enough that it wouldn't blow the Spy's cover. Truly, there could be no special move that signifies capturing an objective as it would be a dead give-away in this game about hiding in plain sight. I decided leaving your Spy on an objective point from the set you chose at the beginning of the game for the duration of your opponent's turn would be enough to capture an objective. There is enough ambiguity with 1 in 3 chances that moving a piece onto an objective does not necessarily mean it is a Spy capturing an objective. Though with no particular sign that an objective has been captured, it means that players can easily lie. That is what recording your Spy and objective set number at the beginning is for, though it still requires both players remember which pieces were on what objective during their turn to verify an "exit" victory.

As one of the two winning conditions, I knew attacking was a high consequence move by nature. Capturing objectives and reaching the exit rewards a player's deceptive skills, attacking the opponent's Spy rewards their perceptive skills. But perception should be highly rewarded, as it is the main motivation of being deceptive in the first place. To balance that power, faulty judgment should be greatly punished. If a player unknowingly chooses a Decoy as the target of their attack, their opponent should be able to win in the next turn. Attacking is the highest consequence of all: win, or lose.

So what kind of mechanic reflects that? I decided players should have to literally reveal which piece is their Spy in order to attack, and designate a specific piece to be the target. An attacking Spy would have to be next to the target in order to attack, to force a particular move out of the attacking player. The close proximity of an attack makes it more intimate and dramatic than if you could just at any point call out who your Spy is who you think your opponent's Spy is.

At first, I thought a close proximity attack meant that players should have enough movement points to get their Spy to any point on the board in case their opponent makes an obvious move. So I gave them six points at the start of every turn and allowed them to move pieces diagonally. This made for awkward victories where players would suddenly reach the exit. So I cut the points down to three, creating a slower paced game that placed more emphasis on each move in a turn. It also made the gap between the exit and the closest row of objectives a space to pick out a Spy on its way to victory as it now took more than one turn to traverse. This created a whole swath of interesting strategies that I won't get into here.

So I put these rules through some playtesting with friends, family, and fellow developers at my old school, refined, tested, refined, tested, etc. They make for an interesting game. At its best, it's an intense, intimate, thought-provoking experience that plays off your paranoia. At its worst, it's dense, boring, and too demanding. When testing this set of rules, players were often very interested before, during and up to their second or third game, but there wasn't enough immediately different about each match to hold their attention for repeat play. But still they agreed that there is a spark here.

In my next post, I'll talk about how I improved the experience using chance and some of the previously discarded Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy abilities. For now, I leave you with the most recent iteration of the core rules of Decoys. Thanks for reading!

Core Rules

Here's an example of a Decoys board:

Players: 2 (Red dots are player one's starting squares, blue dots are player two's starting squares)

Objective: Capture your three Objective Points (OPs, green numbers) and get your spy to the Exit (yellow dot) OR eliminate your opponent's Spy.

Setup: Each player secretly chooses one of their three pieces to be their Spy, chooses a number 1, 2, or 3 to be their Objective Number (ON), and records this information on a scrap of paper, for honesty's sake. Players then arrange their pieces in any order on their starting squares. The other two pieces are referred to as Decoys.

Turns: On a player's turn they have three Movement Points (MPs) to spend on moving all three of their pieces. It costs one MP to move one piece one square in any direction (but not diagonally), so on a turn you could move all three pieces one square each, or one piece three sqaures, or one piece two squares and another one square. You do not have to spend all of your MPs in a turn, but you always start the turn with exactly three. Any number of pieces can occupy the same square. A player's turn is over when they declare it.

Capturing Objectives: Your ON determines which OPs you need to capture with your Spy - for example, if your ON is 1 then you need to capture OPs marked with a 1. To capture an OP, simply leave your Spy on a square marked with your ON during your opponents turn. The objective stays on the board, you only need to mentally keep track of what OPs you capture. Only a Spy can capture an OP, and only if it is a square matching the player's ON. A Spy can be left on an OP that doesn't match the player's ON but will not capture it. Decoys can be left on an OP during an opponent's turn but will not capture it.

Reaching the Exit: If a player captures all three of their OPs, they can move their Spy into the Exit, ending the game and winning. As soon as the Spy reaches the Exit square with three captured objectives, the game is over. Decoys cannot enter the Exit square.

Attacking: If a player thinks they know which of their opponent's pieces is the Spy, they can move their Spy to a square adjacent to the suspicious piece and declare an attack against it. To do this, the player must declare which piece they are attacking with, reveal that it is their Spy, and point out which piece they are attacking. The opponent then reveals whether or not the piece that is getting attacked is their Spy. If it is their Spy, then the game ends and the attacking player has won. If it is not their Spy, then the attacked Decoy piece is removed, the attacker's turn is over, and the game continues on.