There are two key things you need to do to win in a social deception game. The first, obviously, is accomplish your primary objective. This is usually fairly straightforward and varies depending on what game you are playing. In a game like Captain’s Gambit, your objective could be killing your opponents, gathering resources, or keeping your allies alive. However, the second thing you need to do is much trickier: you need to keep your primary goal hidden. If you don’t other players will know what they need to do to stop you. For example, in Among Us, half of the Imposters’ job is to make sure the Crewmates don’t find out who they are. It’s not enough to just murder everyone; they need to secretly murder everyone.

This second goal is the same regardless of what social deception game you’re playing. This means if you want to make your own social deception game, you’re going to need to design ways that players can keep their true intentions undetected. So how can you help your players stay hidden? Today, I’m going to share a sneaky design trick we used in Captain’s Gambit to empower our players to hide in plain sight.