No one expected the addition of this twitch mechanic to make the game even more about behavior! This was surprising, and yet totally awesome.

In other words, because there was the possibility of the Spy performing missions in a way that was not immediately detectable, the Sniper had to lift up to watching for behavioral tells-like partygoers acting with too much intentionality-rather than just waiting to see a hard tell. Once we started playtesting for real, a very interesting thing happened that no one expected, and was, in fact, sort of the opposite of what we expected: the mere existence of the good result in the Action Test forced the Sniper to play the “behavioral game” more than watching for tells. Being a good game designer (not to mention a highly competitive game player), Paul used the new Practice Mode I put in for the IGF to practice the Action Test over and over again, and he kept track of how he improved.

Before playing we discussed all sorts of different aspects of the mechanic, including how often players should get each result ( good, okay, and bad), how subtle the tells should be for the different results, and the like.

Spyparty no action test