Overview
Team Project (2 people)
Completed in 2023 (Release TBD)
Physical Card Game
My roles:
Game Designer
Artist
MobTies is a game about alliances, secrecy, and betrayal! As mafia dons, players hire hitmen to make secret hits on their fellow players. Will you stay on the up-and-up with your cohorts, or will you go against the family? It's time to whack your neighbors!
Mob Ties was a personal project I made with one other person. It is a party game for up to 8 people where players collect items to use in hits against their opponents. All hits are done in secret. Players are encouraged to openly communicate, negotiate, trade cards, etc. The mechanics in Mob Ties sucessfully foster interesting social dynamics like alliances, betrayles, and grudges.
Accomplishments
Designed systems that create interesting social situations and dynamics.
Designed unique mechanics to this genre that encourage secrecy and mistrust.
Produced a complete, physical card game with various components.
Wrote the instruction manual.
Designed vital UI elements like card templeates, reference cards, and hit selection dials.
Design Philosophy
We wanted the a game of Mob Ties to play out like a dramatic feud between rival mob families. To do this, the design philosophy was to create interesting social dynamics (alliances, rivalries, etc.). It was also important that these social dynamics would change throughout the game (for example, people would betray each other). This was achieved primarily with two mechanics: the secret hits and the ability to freely communicate between players.
Secrecy
The central mechanic of Mob Ties is secretly calling hits on your opponent. Our first major design challenge was figuring out how to introduce secrecy into a physical card game. In the final game, to make a hit a player would place a dial and a set of cards in an envelope. Afterwards, every other player had a chance to make a hit. All the envelopes are then shuffled and the hits are read out loud.
This system succeeded in allowing the hits to be secretive. From this core mechanic, several interesting social dynamics emerged. People would speculate who hit them, they would accuse other people, they would shift blame to their enemies. Particularly strategic players could used the secretive nature of the hits to pull off interesting and unexpected moves. Once a player called a hit on themselves (that they knew they could block) just to create social tension and break up an alliance that was forming. Even months after development has ended, new and unexpected plays are still made thanks to this central secret hit mechanic.
The hit mechanic had so much potential that we created new mechanics to supplemental it. An example of this was the "Mob Rules" rule. With this new rule, during a hit phase anybody could call a hit without supplying the necessary cards. These types of hits were categorized separately from typical hits. If all of the Mob Rules hits targeted the same player, that player would be hit. This new rule encouraged people to mobilize together. If a player was unlikable, a group of players had the ability to combat them together.
Communication
The secondary mechanic of Mob Ties is the ability to freely communicate and trade with other players. We purposefully defined the rules of this mechanic loosely: players can talk to others at any point in the game, they can trade with anyone at any point, they can disclose what cards they want to give, they can hide what cards they want to give, they can even trick other players.
Because we gave players so much agency, the game naturally started to play out in interesting ways. Games of Mob Ties started to play out like a game of Survivor. Alliances and rivalries naturally formed. The social game became just as important as the core card game. Because we made the conscious effort to encourage this loose system of communication, we were able to capture the experience of playing as a Mob boss concerned with high stakes social situations,
