Critical Play: Spyfall
This piece is an analysis of Spyfall, a deception game created by Alexander Ushan that has made its way from an analogue game to a game hosted several different websites.
Spyfall appears to have a fairly broad target audience, especially considering that it’s simply marketed as a “hilarious party game” by one of its publishers, Hobby World.
The game is started with each player receiving a role. Exactly one player is given the role of the “spy”, while all of the other players are informed of what location they all reside in. The game proceeds by having the players ask each other questions about said location in an effort to discover who the spy is, while the spy works to figure out which location everybody is in. The spy wins if they can figure out the location, while the rest win if they can figure out who the spy is. In this way, deception is absolutely necessary for the spy, which is a delicious recipe for suspicion among the players.
I played Spyfall with a party of four, which is on the low end of the player count spectrum. With this in mind, I believe that the game is exceptionally unbalanced for the spy with few players. With a large group, a spy would usually gather abundant information about the location based on the sheer number of people aside from them that answer questions; however, with few players, this is not the case. With only four players, it quickly became clear that the spy would be found out within a few simple questions, especially with 30 possible locations. This was not fun for the spy. Moreover, everybody realized how the game’s victory was practically pre-assigned to the non-spies, so the game’s initial appeal rapidly deteriorated, leaving a group of people who would much rather be playing something else. Seriously, the spy has to work with this many possible locations:
The game should have been fun because its premise promises a test of trickery and detective-work. With few players, the game delivers on neither.
If I were to try to fix Spyfall’s issues with few players, I would do one of two things:
- Market the game as requiring more than the current players that it says it supports.
- Massively reduce the number of possible locations that can be chosen.
The first idea works because it simply avoids the root issue at play here, while the second idea might work because it allows the spy more breathing room in identifying which locations they could be in. In effect, the second idea would discard much of the information in the game that specifically hampers the spy, giving them a better shot at actually winning.
I feel like this game has a lot of potential to be really fun with a few tweaks, particularly pertaining to how it plays with different numbers of players.
