☆ ~ ​☆ ~ ​☆ ~ ​Party Lines ~ ​☆ ~ ​☆ ~ ​☆

☆ ~ ☆ ~ Design Notes ~ ☆ ~ ☆

Party Lines is a symmetrical, team-based, hidden-role game for 6 to 10 players. The game evolves during the course of play as Bills are proposed to change the core mechanics. The first team to five points, wins.

Party Lines began development in early 2016, before the Republican nomination came to fruition. The last playtest was shortly after the November election, and was decided to be abandoned. During playtesting, a lot of the fun came about attempting to make robot- and reptile-themed puns about the names of gross American politicians, which no longer felt appropriate. As we entered the year 2017, cynicism and sarcasm, especially through parody, needed to die out. I'm only releasing this game now as an unfinished prototype to clear it from my project backlog and send it to the archives.

 ☆ ~ ☆ ~ Game Strategy ~ ☆ ~ ☆

The game's mechanics are an interesting take on the logic-style nature of hidden role games, where you can usually guarantee the player sitting across from you is of the opposing faction, and you can trust at least one of your neighbors. Deduction is difficult to make until certain Bills are passed, incentivizing everyone to start playing strategically around the players sitting next to them.

As the game progresses into the later rounds, it might become stagnant and polarizing, and everyone feels confident in their assumptions about each other's roles. However, there is significantly less animosity in games like Resistance or Mafia, as no one team has a clear advantage over the other. Giving away your identity is usually only indirectly revealed with the high-point cards, but Bureaucracy helps go back into hiding.

Overall, the game was meant to communicate something about my frustration with politics at the time, an attempt at "solving" a problem with other hidden role games, and to have something available when too many people showed up to game night. Ultimately, I think it failed on all three counts.