DupliCITY
Artist’s Statement
DupliCITY is a social negotiation game in which players become city council members vying to shape their city according to their interests. They will go through 10 rounds of juicy deliberation in which they vote for public works projects and city elections amid disruptive special events.
Round after round, players convene to engage in fervent discussion over the latest additions to their city, where to place them, and, ultimately, who will reap the benefits. Every public works project the city takes on means another opportunity for players to further their own interests and elevate their status, whether it be as Mayor, Postmaster, or any other office they can get their hands on.
In creating this experience, we hope to provide players invigorating social interactions through which they can forge alliances with other players just as much as they can exploit them. Collaboration is paramount in DupliCITY, and players shouldn’t be able to win without engaging with one another. Ultimately, we want this game to play like politics, where players work together to benefit themselves.
Formal Elements and Values of DupliCITY
At DupliCITY’s inception, we were inspired by games like Secret Hitler, Mafia, and Catan to craft a player experience marked by negotiation and deception. For the competitively inclined, this game should be a blast. Furthermore, we wanted to imbue the game with a sense of forward momentum; in other words, we wanted the game to increase in complexity as it progressed, providing a narrative of the city’s development throughout the game. In light of these roots, we needed to develop mechanics that would lend themselves to the fellowship and fantasy types of fun.
To facilitate negotiation, we decided that the game would feature voting. We initially deliberated about whether voting would be anonymous. Some games, like Among Us, go with public voting, which complements the existence of hidden roles well. That being said, we didn’t want our game to feature hidden roles, so we eventually decided to go the anonymous route.
To facilitate deception, we introduced hidden information by way of unique player goals. Each player has a map depicting which of the city blocks will benefit them if built upon, but each player only knows their own map. In this way, players would be able to lie about which spots they had, possibly swaying the rest of the players to help them unknowingly.
To contribute to narrative development throughout a single game, we decided that the game would feature random events and public service roles that players can be elected to. The random events typically can harm a player, but are also countered by particular roles. In this way, these two mechanics serve the dual purposes of adding variability to different matches while also encouraging unique social interactions based on player dependencies on players with roles.
Given the mechanics that we’ve discussed, this game isn’t a game that can be won without collaborative and strategic play; further, it rewards those who can form alliances while also keeping the distance necessary to garner majority votes in their favor.
Iterating on DupliCITY
Introduction
The final rule set we developed can be found here. In that document, you’ll find an overview of the game and all information necessary to play it. We will discuss DupliCITY’s iteration history with respect to the final rules, so look to the core gameplay described there for reference!
Prototype & Playtest 1
In our first prototype, we worked with a base version of our game in which events and roles didn’t exist. In doing so, we intended to gauge the strength of voting as a conflict instigator. This stripped down version of the game still involved the player maps, so hidden information was still a factor in both deliberation and voting. Additionally, all tiles were open for voting on every single turn. This prototype utilized Zoom and Google Sheets.
Overall, players really enjoyed the opportunity to roleplay as concerned citizens debating over what would be best for their city and their community. Discussions were heavily peppered with comments like “I think the best place for our city hall would be in the center of our great city” and “wouldn’t we want the fire station next to city hall to keep our capital safe from wildfires.”
Some other key findings from our first in-class playtest:
- Players were unclear on how to name tile locations since both rows and columns were labeled with numbers (like (4, 3) being the location of the fire station instead of (D, 3), like on a chess board).
- High amount of overlap between player maps led to the first couple of public works projects being built on the tiles with the highest overlap between players and not tiles chosen strategically, as was desired.
- Without the presence of more high stakes situations it was unclear what the advantage was to forging alliances early in-game instead of relying on simple, transactional relationships that shifted per round.
Prototype & Playtest 2
For our second prototype, we added roles and events, albeit on a limited basis. We added a “Mayor” role that could veto a project, but it would result in immediate resignation. We also added a “Fire Marshall” role that could counteract the random “Fire” event. The “Fire” event was complemented by a “Sunny Day” event that effectively served as a “nothing happened” event. Finally, we formalized the periods within a round to leave less room for error in moderating. Beyond these fundamental rule changes, we also improved the game’s Google Sheets functionality by adding drop down menus and changing one axis of the game board to feature letters.
Overall, players found this iteration of the game to be easier to jump into. Players again immediately got comfortable in their roles as city council members and began roleplaying in their discussions which kept the game fun and exciting.
Some other key findings from our second in-class playtest:
- Clearer delivery of the game rules made for fewer snags in-game, like players not having to ask how long they had for discussion or how exactly roles, like Mayor and Fire Marshal, factoring into gameplay.
- Transition to letter row labels and numbered column labels eliminated the issue with players being unsure how to explicitly name the tile they were referring to.
- Not changing the amount of overlapping tiles on player maps caused the same issues to arise in-game:
- First couple of public works projects were again built on the tiles with the highest overlap between players
- Discussion centered little around negotiations between players on where to place tiles and more around players that were committed to speaking the most and the loudest.
- Addition of the fire event and Mayor and Fire Marshall abilities added complexity to the game that players appreciated. Multiple players expressed interest in growing the number of event types and roles to the game.
Prototype & Playtest 3
For our third prototype, we added several roles and events, which can all be viewed in the rule set mentioned above. We also removed the “Sunny Day” event; it didn’t add any excitement to the game when it occurred, and though it was intended as a respite, players didn’t view it that way. We also added point values to the player maps to add further complexity to player decision-making; should they argue for a 1-point tile that many people share, or a 3-point tile that would require adept persuasion? Once more, we added polish to the game’s Google Sheets in order to more cleanly facilitate gameplay.
Overall, players found this to be highly engaging and easy to jump into. The presence of the Public Works/Roles/Events table made it easy for players to follow along when the rules were being explained while the City Grid, Turn/Event Tracker, and Player Role Tracker made the flow of the game clearer to the players. Once again, players freely jumped right into roleplaying as city council members and extended that to role elections, something that had not been tested out in the previous round of playtesting.
Some other key findings from our third in-class playtest:
- The removal of the Sunny Day event guaranteed that events would play a larger role in gameplay and led to the particularly interesting development where the very first event led to City Hall nearly burning down, heightening the stakes of the game immediately.
- The added trackers embedded in the gameboard helped streamline turns and center them much more around the players and not general housekeeping.
- Limiting the number of tiles that can be voted on per turn enriched discussions between players as players were often forced to consider how they could gain an advantage from their vote despite none of the tiles up for a vote being one of their targets.
Final Prototype & Playtest
Our final prototype includes the last modifications we made based on the findings from playtest 3. First, we came to realize the importance of having the mayor as the tie-breaker for every round of the game, especially with fewer players in the game since ties occurred at a high frequency during playtest 3. We decided to add a second run-off vote to the mayor’s election in the first round to ensure one player gets elected mayor. Additionally, we decided to speed up each round’s pace by merging the voting period with the 3-minute discussion period.
In terms of random chance, we decided to keep the limit on the number of tiles that can be voted on per turn so that players can generate more long-term strategies and richer discussions with more levels of interest every round. Besides changes to the game mechanics, we also changed the game’s color theme to a dark, orange yellow color based on the feedback on our previous theme color.
Today is the big day! We invited six players to participate in the game and ran the game for a good hour. Overall, the game is a great success in terms of generating fun through fantasy and immersion. Since the beginning of the game, players immediately jumped into branding their proposals as to how they would benefit the city. One player quickly picked up the game’s political setting and explicitly advocated for an exchange of benefits as in “lobbying.” In the second round, two players began to develop an alliance with long term collaboration in mind and were quickly pointed out by a third player suspecting their “duplicity” in building the city. From the designer’s perspective, the discussions evolved in the exact same way as to how we hoped it to be.
As the game went on, all players spoke out to voice their opinions and were fully immersed in the conversation. As a result, many discussions ran past the time limit, with players feeling upset when the moderator ended the discussion. The game turned out to be much longer than we expected as we weren’t able to finish one game in an hour, similar to the often painfully long decision-making process in real-life city councils.
Impressions and key findings from our final playtest:
- Just like real life, the moderator plays a crucial role in facilitating the discussion, such as setting the tone of the conversation, moderating the topic, and keeping a check on time.
- The game needs to be (a lot) shorter, ideally no longer than 25 minutes. One suggestion made by the players is to have multiple elections and events happening in a single round to increase efficiency. Another possibility is to reduce the total number of roles.
- Players tend to prefer having all buildings with roles associated with them. Buildings without roles provide much less incentive to own.
- It was still common to have players in a tie situation regarding the total number of points earned. A broader range of scores needs to be added to the player maps.
Vision for DupliCITY on Mobile
In designing DupliCITY, we envisioned the game to be on mobile devices so that players can interact digitally without meeting face-to-face, which opens up the opportunity to play with a much broader player base and is also a timely feature under quarantine measures.
Final Thoughts and Future Steps
Now that we’ve had some great opportunities to test out our core game, our next steps would be to move DupliCITY off of Google Sheets and onto the web as a standalone web application! By moving the game to a web application we would be able to make the human moderator optional and allow for all participants to enjoy the game as council members, as was intended from the start.
Once we’ve moved the game to an online platform, some additions we’d like to make to the core game include:
- More varied weights on player map tiles that really emphasize for players what tiles they should pursue most aggressively (and some negative score tiles that they should prevent from being built on at all costs).
- Adding fun, new special events that heighten the stakes and force players to account for even greater shifting circumstances, hopefully enriching negotiations and the game overall.
- Balancing player roles to ensure they promote mutually beneficial relationships between players in the short-term and high-stakes conflicts of interest in the long term.
Play the Game Yourself!
Everything you need to play DupliCITY can be found within the following Google Drive folder: DupliCITY Game Box. Since gameplay involves editing of the files in that folder, copy the entire folder into your own Google Drive!
Within the DupliCITY Game Box you’ll find:
Gameboard — Contains the DupliCITY City Grid, as well as the Turn Tracker/Event Generator, all in a handy Google Sheet.
Game Manual — Contains the full rule breakdown for DupliCITY.
Player Maps — Contains 6 DupliCITY Player Maps, each in their own Google Sheet to be shared discreetly by the Moderator.
