Forsaken Forest and the Social Deduction Game Genre

Welcome, fellow Social Deduction enthusiasts! My name is Alec Nezin. I’m the CEO and owner of Forsaken Games.

Today, I’d like to give you a little bit of personal background and my thoughts on the social deduction genre as a whole, a highlight of a few very important games within the genre, and how I’ve tried to improve upon the genre with my own game, Forsaken Forest.

I’m going to start off by providing a little context to what led me to being a game designer, and how games have fit into my life for the past 20+ years.

Magic: the Gathering

Like millions of others, the foundation of my gaming background is Magic: the Gathering. I’ve been playing since I was about 10 years old. I’m currently 30 — that’s twenty full years of MTG. Magic has influenced the way that I think about, play, and design games. From art, to game mechanics, to setting, it has truly shaped my world (gaming or otherwise).

Something that I’ve dearly held onto when creating games is the value of lore and universe building. A game’s backstory and lore has the ability to completely shape the way that people play it.

I put a lot of tender loving care into not only building the lore and backstory for Forsaken Forest, but in carefully curating the right artists to bring my vision to life.

I wanted game art which properly reflected the dark and horror-filled landscape that I imagined the Forsaken Forest to be, but also the terror that lost travelers would feel while trapped within.

College Education

Before devoting my life to making games, I studied Social Psychology and Applied Statistics.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for how people think when they’re playing games and how they approach games, in general. People play games for a ton of different reasons, but something that resonates with me when I play social deduction games as a good guy is feeling like a detective and piecing together the puzzle. Social Psychology comes from a similar place of trying to to understand the world and figure out why people do the things they do.

A lot of elements of Social Deduction actually intersect with some very prominent elements of Social Psychology. Concepts like group-mentality, subconscious physical cues, and cognitive errors/fallacies play huge part in games like Mafia and Werewolf, this is especially true with inexperienced players. Playing werewolf has made me even more cognizant of a lot of these concepts.

When I first began playing Werewolf, I was fascinated with just watching and collecting what seemed like scientific information. I never actually followed through with a practical application of this field of study, but I did go on to pursue the data science side of things.

I was a Data Scientist within the game industry for over 5 years before I moved on to creating my own games.

Werewolf

I think Werewolf/Mafia is usually one’s first encounter with the Social Deduction Genre — it’s THE original Social Deduction game and an unrivaled classic.

I discovered Werewolf during my college years, and it awakened something in me.

Werewolf represented everything I imagined a murder mystery would be like, but with an awesome theme. There are no higher stakes than a decision (or series of decisions) that will determine if you live or die.

The logic puzzles. The alliances. The cross interrogation. The drama of pleading your case with an eloquent monologue on “The Stand”. The thrill of lying and getting away with it. The ecstasy of lynching a player and discovering that you were correct and they were, indeed, evil!

All of this together made Werewolf an incredibly deep and compelling game — much deeper than people give it credit for. I started to think of all of the different strategies and metrics that I could analyze during a game to give me an edge.

• Body Language
• Voting
• Alliances
• Band-Wagoning
• Level of Involvement
• Speech Patterns
• Testimony while being questioned
• Logic Checks
• Analyzing “Goods” and “Bads”
• Decision Trees

All of these factors (and more) were absolutely fascinating to me and made yearn for something even better.

The Resistance

My second foray into Social Deduction was The Resistance. This game was intriguing to me because of how it added a unique physical element — with the addition of a simple set of voting cards, and the “Mission” system, it added untold depth to the genre. I loved that the game could be played with five players, and still have depth — something that was difficult with Werewolf.

What I liked:

No elimination — this is obviously the least enjoyable part of Werewolf and Mafia. No one enjoys being ejected from the game. The Resistance changed the game by doing away with it, but in practice, there was still “soft elimination” — what I mean by this is that a player is determined by the majority to be bad and thus they are extremely unlikely to be selected for a Mission, but they are still free to try to sway the group to make bad decisions.

Voting Cards — The addition of voting cards and anonymous voting added a lot of strategy to the genre. The nomination cycle, while seemingly simple, provides a treasure trove of information to those more analytically inclined. If you were especially diligent, you could really dive deep into the nominations and voting results.

Game Flow — Finally, I liked the idea of the Nomination/Mission Cycle dictating the pacing of the game, instead of any time-based limitations.

This led to a much more structured game that relied a lot upon reads and feels, but provided a lot more actual information to lean on when it came down to the wire. This is something that was sorely lacking in Werewolf.

Saboteur

Saboteur is the game that really changed my perspective on the genre. Saboteur adds cards AND the action of “Navigation” to the social deduction genre. This was exactly what I was looking for in a game. It attempted to combine all of the cool puzzle aspects of social deduction with some light card strategy.

What I liked:

I loved that there was a different way to win the game besides group voting (Missions) or elimination. The path building aspect was very interesting and provided ways to lie (by claiming a lack of options).

I loved the use of cards to make game actions, but disliked the relatively low number of actual choices you could make with them.

I did really enjoy the ability to “soft lock” an opposing player by breaking their tool, thus making them unable to take any game actions. This mechanic felt far better than elimination, and gave each team the ability to break out of potential danger.

What I disliked:

Some of the things that I disliked about the game were that there were only three actual Destinations that the group could travel to, and that given the number of players, this information could be determined rather easily. On the other side of the coin, the fact that all of the Destination are near one another gives The Saboteurs a great way to make progress, without drawing too much suspicion.

The fact that there were three distinct rounds made each of those rounds feel less important and put less fear into the good guys, for they could always catch up in the next round.

I also disliked that the good guys basically had an infinite amount of time to figure out the puzzle if the group played optimally.

Once cornered, the bad guys had basically no recourse besides just pushing forward, despite being outed, and the good guys could only hope that they could find the right cards to stop them.

What I aimed to change with Forsaken Forest

Destinations and Traveling

I loved the idea of having a true objective within the game, besides elimination and choosing missions.

The Destination/Traveling mechanic was designed before I skinned the game to be set within a Forest, but I feel like it fits perfectly in reflecting the dread, uncertainty and hopelessness of trying to escape from a haunted forest.

The card Wander is pretty aptly named, as most players are truly in the dark as to where they are actually traveling. I wanted to really reinforce the idea of waking up in the middle of nowhere and trying to figure out where to go — the overwhelming number of options that you’d have in that situation. When you’re lost, you have to start somewhere.

In Saboteur, there are only three actual Destinations, so there is a much higher chance of accidentally stumbling upon the correct/incorrect Destination by accident.

I wanted the stakes to be high and I wanted to reduce the variance of accidentally making the correct/incorrect choice, so I made eight Destinations — all equidistant from the starting point (not in a row next to one another).

I wanted traveling to one of these Destinations be life-threatening and potentially end the game immediately, but I also wanted it to take effort and strategy for that to actually happen.

Rules Book for reference!

Tutorial Video

Strategy

Do not get me wrong, there is most definitely a lot strategy involved in social deduction games. There are so many ways that one can gain an edge, plan traps for their opponents/trick them, and solve logic puzzles. I love these aspects of the game and wanted to make it easier for players to do this. I think because of the depth of Forsaken Forest and the wide range of cards and abilities of each card, it is a lot easier to plant traps, trick, outsmart, and outplay your opponents.

While Werewolf provides a wide range of interrogation-oriented and logical traps that you can plant for your opponents, Forsaken Forest provides actual strategic traps with cards.

Voting

I loved the voting aspect of The Resistance (and to a lesser extent, Werewolf). I’m math-oriented by nature, and I love to go back and take a microscope to the results of every single vote that occurred within the game in order to solve the puzzle through statistics.

This is especially highlighted in the expansion of the game, where cards get better or worse depending on who you can convince to side with you and your cause.

Information

The thing I dislike most about Werewolf is the lack of information. Day one is notoriously useless in terms of using existing information, but acts as a means to generate it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel bad to simply randomly eliminate someone from the game.

In a standard game, there are definitely tangible things to go off, but nothing concrete in the sense that you are physically looking at the information. Werewolf is a game that emphasizes subtle clues and patterns.

Something that I wanted to really emphasize in Forsaken Forest was the actual amount of tangible information available for the players to discover and utilize (thus, the “Discovery” card type was born).

In Forsaken Forest there are many different axis’ of secret information for the players to utilize to their benefit: The include: Each player’s face-down Role Card, each player’s hand of cards (what they have chosen to not play can be extremely important), Each of the face-down Destinations, and the Night Action Cards (and who is doing the placing during night).

The act of placing Path Tokens down on the board in order to travel is a very explicit piece of information, but the underlying reason for one doing it is a mystery, so I definitely count this as secret information, as well!

Besides hidden information, all of the behavioral and subtle clues that make werewolf great are also part of the game.

When you combine all of this possible information, the game becomes a massive and intricate puzzle for those who have Villagers. And a complex and fragile conspiracy for the Forsaken, who must constantly balance their lies with the available information.

Elimination

I think that elimination is an outdated mechanic, in general. Almost every feel-bad experience that I’ve had playing a game has been due to being eliminated by something outside of my control. I wanted to desperately fix that, but also include Death as a key mechanic to the game. I came up with Death’s Doorstep, Revival and Spirits.

In Forsaken Forest, when you are killed (and there are quite a few ways for it to happen) you are now on Death’s Doorstep. This does not mean that you’re dead, but rather that you’re critically injured and clinging onto life. This middle ground allows players to decide in real-time whether they would like to save that player with a Revival card — these card bring an injured player back from the brink of death.

If the group is unable to save you, or let you die, then you become a Spirit.

Spirits in Forsaken Forest are virtually the same as a normal player in Werewolf. That is, they may continue to talk and argue with other players, and attempt to win the game for their team, but they can no longer take any game actions, vote, or wake up during the night (if they had a Night Ability).

A lot of the cards in the Spirit Uprising expansion play on the Spirit mechanic and allows Spirits to Possess living players, be Reincarnated into dying player’s bodies, and even return to the plane of the living and take game actions for a single turn cycle.

It is my firm belief that this system works much better for the genre. It rewards players for killing the opposing team, but does not punish the dying players by removing them from the game permanently and actually opens up new avenues of interaction.

Win Conditions

Most social deduction games only have one win condition, let it be elimination, successful missions, or traveling. I believe that game play is much more interesting when you have multiple paths to victory — it simply means that games can play out in very different ways and that teams have the ability to switch strategies during the span of a game and in response to the opposing team’s play.

That’s why each Team in Forsaken Forest can win through either

• Traveling to their Team’s Destination (The Village and The Void)

Or by

• Killing the prerequisite number of players on the opposing team.

I like the idea of Death as a resource that each team has and can interact with. The key is that Death does not equate to elimination, but actually opens up new ways to interact and play the game for that player.

The Night Phase

A common theme in social deduction games is a Day Phase, where a majority of the game takes place and then a Night Phase, where secret actions take place. The Resistance and Saboteur did away with this, but I think that those secret actions are what makes social deduction great.

Going back to what I said about Saboteur and the lack of pressure on the good guys. I thought it was essential to the game to put pressure on the Villagers to make choices and decisions and progress the game, for good or for bad. The Night Phase is a great form of pressure, as it represents the death of a good guy.

In Werewolf, there is a self-imposed time limit on the length of the day — at the end of that time limit, players are usually either forced to choose someone to Lynch, or to not kill anyone, but either way, they’ll immediately go to Night.

I didn’t like the idea of a timer for a board game, so instead of using time as a resource, I decided to make the resource which dictated the phases of the game be the number of turns taken.

In Forsaken Forest, the group takes six player turns. After six turns have been taken, The Forest takes its turn.

The Forest plays as a sort of a Automa within the game and uses its own deck of cards, called the Forest Deck.

This way, good guys are not free to simply take as much time as they need (and draw through the Deck in order to Peek at each player) in order to solve the puzzle. They are constantly pressured by the Forest Deck — which has a wide range of devastating cards that can sabotage the group.

The most numerous card in the Forest Deck is Encroaching Darkness — this is the means by which the game enters the Night Phase of the game.

Time is not a resource, rather, individual turns and game actions are — this ensures that each player gets an equal share of influencing the game. Turns also make sure that players do not quarterback the game and prevent other players from providing input, or enacting their strategy.

The Night Action Cards

The Night Action Cards are my take on how to implement a Night Phase with no outside moderator in the game.

In Werewolf, a moderator must notate and track the decisions of the players during the Night. In Forsaken Forest, those players who wake up during the night simply place their Night Action Card into the face-down hand of cards of the player they wish to target.

This ensures that no players have to sit out in order to make sure the game plays out smoothly and also provides some very cool ways to covertly interact with other players.

I expect that this mechanic will be further explored in future expansions!

Special Abilities

My absolute favorite part of Werewolf is definitely when I get a chance to use my role’s special ability. It’s such a fulfilling feeling to save the day with a good play. This is the feeling that players have the opportunity to feel throughout the entire game when they play Forsaken Forest.

Each of the cards in the Travelers Deck is based off of the special abilities found in Werewolf. From Peeking at a player’s Role Card (The Seer in Werewolf) to saving a player who has been killed (The Medic in Werewolf) to straight up shooting a player you distrust (The Gunman in Werewolf) all of these abilities can be found in card form!

While I think an argument can be made that this makes each of those abilities less special, I think the counter argument is that the game is a lot more dramatic and fun. Some people enjoy being a powerless villager in werewolf, so they can just focus on solving the puzzle. I say “why not hand them a gun and see what happens?”

The first Kickstarter and jumping into the Board Game Industry

Some of you may have seen Forsaken Forest launch the first time around in 2018. Since then, I devoted my time to working for Forsaken Games and Forsaken Games alone. I’ve been working on three games since I first launched Forsaken Forest. This expansion is the first game on the docket!

What I’ve added to Forsaken Forest in the expansion

New Roles — this one is a no-brainer! Something that I think was sorely missing from the Base Set was a Role which could secretly switch Destinations — thus the Village Earthcrafter and the Forsaken Earthcrafter were born. I think this creates extremely tricky game play and “gotcha” moments.

For the expansion, I wanted to create Roles that did not belong to either of the teams. I created five stand-alone teams with unique win conditions. I found it extremely fun and challenging to try to use the existing parameters of the game to create new and exciting ways for a team to win the game.

Here are some examples:

The Stranger wins the game by traveling to his own unique Destination — The Door — which is new to the game. They also have the ability to pass on any Night Actions placed in their hand to another player — this makes them invincible during the Night Phase. My favorite role in Werewolf is The Devil — a one man team, that places pressure on both the Villagers and the Werewolves, and I tried to balance that idea for Forsaken Forest.

The Masochist wins the game when he is successfully Revived. I like the idea of roles that have objectives, but also act as counter-weights to existing strategies. Here, The Masochist exists to make players extremely wary of reviving a player who is on Death’s Doorstep.

The Spirit King wins if he’s Dead and the number of Spirit’s outnumbers the number of Living Players. This is another example of a counter-weight Role. His presence in the game limits the rate at which players can kill other players, for if they get too aggressive and there are too many spirits in the game, The Spirit King will win.

The Traveler wins if he’s alive and the group travels to it’s third unique Destination. This Role is interesting because it limits how many “wrong” guesses players can make and pushes them to try to choose specific play patterns.

The Cultist is a very interesting Role, because he acts as a sort of ticking time bomb that cannot be controlled by not traveling or not killing other players. Each Night, he places his Night Action Card — The Cult face-down into a player’s hand of cards. When all living players are in The Cult, he wins the game. The Cultist represents another form of “pressure” that looms over all players and forces them to quicken the pace of the game.

New Destinations

The goal of the base set was to make the Destinations as easy to understand as possible. With only two of them being important (i.e. game-ending), it made the set up stage rather easy. With the expansion, I wanted to push the limits of what Destinations could be within the game and I changed the way that players set up the game as a result.

I don’t expect the average player to reliably be able to memorize the location of eight distinct cards. Instead, the Forsaken will now only know the identity of The Village and The Void as they place the Destinations on the game board during setup. The remaining six Destinations will begins the game face-down and a secret to all players.

On one hand, this lack of info may give the Forsaken an incentive to barrel straight to the Void. This is balanced by the fact that that strategy is extremely risky and often ends in the Forsaken being outed quickly.

On the other side of the coin, the addition of new and exciting Destinations with unique effects will make the game more exciting and provide interesting game play.

Some notable effects of new Destinations include:

The Cabin: When you navigate to this Destination, skip the Forest’s next turn.

The Burrows: When you navigate to this Destination Card, the player who navigated here draws three cards.

The Library: When you navigate to this Destination, each player draws a card.

The Pit: When you navigate to this Destination, the player who navigated here is now on Death’s Doorstep.

Quicksand: When you navigate to this Destination, the player who navigated here cannot take any actions until the next Turn Cycle ends.

The Cave: When you navigate to this Destination, the player who navigated here discards their entire hand.

The Door: When you navigate to this Destination, The Stranger wins the game. The Stranger begins the game with the knowledge of the location of The Door.

The Church: When you navigate to this Destination, the player who
navigated here puts a Cult Card into their hand of cards.

I believe that the Destination Switching Roles will be the favorite role of many players as they will prevent instant Forsaken wins and place some doubt in their minds as they rush the Void.

Spirits and their role in the Expansion

I wanted to give a final perspective on the Spirit mechanics available in the expansion!

Possession — there are multiple cards which allow Spirits to take control of a living player for a turn cycle. I drew heavy inspiration from the Magic card “Mindslaver”.

I love the idea of commandeering someone’s decisions within the game, and this mechanic gives Spirits a way to feel like they’re still involved, or at least have the possibility of being involved. It’s also extremely powerful and give a team a backdoor way to really pull ahead and use the opposing team’s resources in order to gain an advantage.

Reincarnation — this was the most complicated mechanic to flesh out within the expansion. This mechanic allows a Spirit to permanently gain control of the body of a player who is dying — but the twist is that those players must switch role cards (and chairs), but keep their original Team Affiliation.

This can become complicated when a Villager Team player is Reincarnated into a Forsaken’s Team player’s body (and role). Their goal is still to win the game for the Villager Team, but they now have a few distinct advantages!

1. They know that they are a Forsaken, and they know it will benefit their team to kill them.

2. If they go to the Night Phase of the game, they will wake up to see the remaining Forsaken left in the game. If the group believes them, then the game is immediately solved.

On the other hand, they may not believe them! The concept that a Forsaken could also be Reincarnated into that Forsaken Role makes this extremely complex.

Alternatively, if a Forsaken is Reincarnated into a Villager Role, then their true identity has effectively been shrouded!

All in all, I think that Reincarnation provides a lot of cool interactions, and ways to bluff and outplay your opponents.

Listening to Feedback

They say that your game will get more playtesting on the first day that it gets into your backers’ hand than all of the playtesting you’ve done leading up to the launch, and this is definitely true.

The feedback that I received from my Kickstarter Backers was undoubtedly instrumental in improving the game. I listened to every suggestion and piece of criticism. This led to a number of improvements in the card text, many clarifications and edits within the rules book, and even changes in cards and the creation of additional components.

A New Rule — The Fugue Phase

After hearing feedback from my Kickstarter backers, I decided to implement The Fugue Phase. You know that feeling when you’re lost and you just start frantically wandering and hoping that you’ll easily make it to safety? That’s what I wanted to replicate with The Fugue Phase.

The real impetus behind this new rule was a desire to push the pace of the game a little bit. I wanted to force players to start making navigation decisions early in the game. This also gives the Forsaken a means to start their path to the Void (and obfuscates their intentions).

A New Rule — The Must Wander Rule

In the spirit of pushing the pace of the game, I also added the Must-Wander Rule. This rule basically states that if you have a Wander in hand, you cannot play nothing instead of playing that Wander. If you play any other card from your hand, you will not be forced to play a Wander.

This rule was formulated in order to:

1. Prevent stale games where players were not progressing the game in any meaningful way.
2. Allow Forsaken players to use this rule as a bluff in order to subtly progress their game plan and Wander without drawing too much heat (much like the Paths are implemented in Saboteur).

The Companion App — A Big Step for the Game

Since Forsaken Forest’s initial inception, it has been a goal of mine to create a companion app to go along with the game.

Not because I thought that self-moderating the game was too hard, but because it would allow players to focus on what matters — strategy and game play.

The Companion App allows players to easily choose the Roles to be included in the game, gives real-time analysis of the game balance of the Roles chosen, and then seamlessly moderates the chosen Roles for both nights of the game.

It’s a real game changer, and makes the Setup process much easier and stress-free.

If this article has been interesting or insightful for you, then I would love if you checked out the preview for Spirit Uprising — the upcoming expansion for Forsaken Forest and followed Forsaken Games for updates on when it launches.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forsakengames/1314049213?ref=2lzk6j&token=4b000601