Game Design Breakdown: Party Games

Games in the party genre rely on the intrinsic value of humor, surprise, and creativity, and offer very simple rule sets with limited value of points.

Screenshot from a prompt-based party game I made while I was at Oculus.

Extrinsic motivators aren’t valued here, or to quote Drew Carey from the game where everything is made up: “the points don’t matter.”

People want to be funny and laughter has shown to “prolong people’s tolerance for pain” and “deal with stressful situations more easily.” Humor is surprising, liberating, and creative. Offering players a structured platform for humor offers intrinsic value that deserves a place on the metric board just as much as tangible points.

If we look at competitive games, it’s much easier to directly correlate points to competition, which is why many design teams point to these systems as a way to motivate players or offer them progression. Often in party games, people in the group automatically get “points” from their fellow players for being funny in a social context, without designers having to manage that in a metric system.

We can offer different sets of shapes per day, or different shapes per round to increase content and complexity and the element of surprise. We could offer more prompts. We should definitely visually emphasize who has chosen the sneak correctly and who hasn’t on top of the meta games outside of the core loop to provide more structure and juice. But we should also recognize that the opportunity for humor is an incentive in social gameplay and shouldn’t be cast aside in lieu of measurable points.

A few key pillars for designing party games include:

• Keep systems simple — no need for multipliers or complicated math
• Expand diversity through variation — give players the tools to create variety in their results
• Encourage sharing — give players every opportunity to easily share their finest moments

In my time making party games, the dev team always struggled with the following:

1. What makes this game replayable?
2. What keeps people from cheating or farming?

So let’s take a look at a few different games through these lenses.

Draw Something

Draw Something is an asynchronous drawing game based on prompts. It has no concept of “rounds.” Players are given a choice to choose a difficulty of prompt resulting in more/less coins that can be used to purchase new colored markers.

What makes this game replayable?

There is little extrinsic incentive to replay. It’s a casual game that can be played in your off time with friends or strangers. It requires little commitment and doesn’t ask much of me, but offers some structure to allow me to have a quick laugh while flexing my creative muscle. It also offers sharability of creations to social media.

What keeps people from cheating or farming?

There are very little tangible rewards in this game to farm. The only point for players is to draw something, so cheating by writing out the prompt would ruin the entire game and break the magic circle.

Download it here.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves

There are rounds in this game based around a very weird, loose narrative that ultimately bring us to a boss fight. It’s based on innovative, wacky interactions that provide everyone watching a good laugh at the person playing the game (while they are laughing at themselves).

What makes this game replayable?

This game also has few extrinsic rewards for the players, but instead offers humor and socializing as incentive to come back. This game has received great reviews from people who played it on launch, and keep pulling it out as a party game many years later. There are rounds, and they give us a sense of progression when we’re playing single player, with most of the point in doing so being to unlock the rest of the multiplayer game to play at parties without the progression. I enjoy being able to show this at a party and continue playing the short rounds without having to commit to it, playing as little or as long as I’d like. It’s a cheap, fun, and easy to learn activity.

Smooth Moves was originally on the Wii U, and WarioWare: Get It Together! Has now been created for the Switch. See a video of the gameplay here.

Some reviews of WarioWare: Smooth Moves:

Nintendo World Report was pleased with the game’s variety, but found the small number of unlockable items and lack of high scores disappointing. In Shapetionary, we’re able to provide a cheap, fun activity, while tying long term rewards to how many times people were able to dupe others while being the sneak, or how many times they were able to find the sneak, mitigating the issue shown in this review. It’s a loose “high-score” system that revolves around the narrative rather than an arbitrary point system.

Eurogamer pointed out that “As with everything WarioWare, they’re lightweight and throwaway, but lovable all the same” which is the sentiment I’ve been trying to hit on with Shapetionary, and is my interpretation of Rich’s “cheap and cheerful.”

Heads Up!

This is a game that is based on prompts and clues where there are no rounds in the game. It’s typically played at parties and bars in order to rope others in with low commitment.

What makes this game replayable?

There is no extrinsic motivation to come back. There isn’t any progression, but I see many people going back to playing it with friends and strangers alike. It’s fun and funny and simple to play with a lot of content to choose from.

What keeps people from cheating or farming?

There are no tangible rewards in this game to farm. The only point for players is to draw something, so cheating by saying the prompt ruin the entire game. SNL did a skit about this called Secret Word.

Download it here.

Action Painting Pro

While this isn’t a multiplayer game and may not even be in the party genre, it still has the creative elements and low commitment of games in the party genre. The only tangible reward for the player is a piece of interesting artwork once you’ve “lost” the game. It missed out on a sharing aspect that could have potentially made it more popular.

What makes this game replayable?

There is some structure to delineate the “round” but there is no progression per round. People come back (or maybe just me, years later over and over again) for the opportunity to share the content they created in the round.

Download it here.

Gartic Phone

Gartic phone is a game of telephone where players write out prompts, and then take turns creating their interpretation of the prompt. Once all the players have drawn all the prompts, everyone gets to see how everyone interpreted them. The game makes it very easy to share the output by providing a gif export at the end.

What makes this game replayable?

This game is structurally simple, but it’s different each time based on the group of players you have, the inside jokes or knowledge of the group, and the sense of humor of the players.

What keeps people from cheating or farming?

As with all the other prompt-based games, if players wrote out the prompt, they would ruin the game for the rest of the group and ruin it for themselves.

Play it here.

If you’re making a party game, remember to keep it simple, increase variety for players, and make it easily sharable. Have fun!