Critical Play: Spyfall

**This article is written as a response to an exercise for Stanford’s CS 247G**

This critical play is on Spyfall, a game created by Cryptozoic and hosted on many different sites (or even physically as a board game). In this instance, my friends and I used the version hosted on https://spyfall.adrianocola.com/.

I’m inferring that the target audience is teenagers to young adults based off the bluffing and inquiry skills that game requires.

Here’s how the game works: there’s a secret location and everyone (except one person, who’s the spy!) is assigned an occupation that’s commonly at that location. No one knows anyone else’s roles but only the spy doesn’t know the location. The objective for the spy is to find out the secret location, and the objective of the civilians is to weed out the spy. For a limited amount of time, Everyone will take turns asking each other questions — just make sure that the questions aren’t too revealing about the location but detailed enough to make it obvious if someone doesn’t know the location.

I think what makes this game stand out is how one gets to adopt an occupation and thus answers are more likely to vary among all the innocent bystanders at the location. This adds an extra dimension of ambiguity to the game and makes it harder to call out a bluff or use inside jokes. Furthermore, this game requires players to practice thinking outside of the box to come up with perfect questions that not only tell others that they’re not the spy but also weed out the actual spy without giving away a location — that’s a lot to be thinking about! I like how this game also allows the spy to practice using the process of elimination, a useful task that we all learn about quite early on in school, to hone in on the location.

Moments of particular success/failure include when the spy is the first to be asked a question. Without any learnt information from the other players answering questions, the spy is making a completely blind guess — it could make or break their performance in the game.

Something that I used to do to improve the game was for everyone to face away from each other so it’s not as obvious who’s fixated on the list of locations on their device. This is an obvious hint for who’s the spy but I firmly believe that the spy should be able to observe and cross off locations without fear of being caught this way. This was actually a lot more natural to implement this time around as everyone is remote and thus staring at their screen anyways.