- As much as possible, eliminate waiting for someone to take a turn
- Downtime is the enemy
- Party games want to support 5+ players; so the common board game structure of "one person takes their turn, everyone else waits" scales very badly
- Examples: Restructuring Incrypt, Pairwise
- Use timers to keep the game moving along
- Analysis paralysis is no fun for people
- Again, downtime is the enemy
- (Maybe tie in to mod controls)
- Fast feedback in-game
- Basic UI principle: when players interact with something, it should be obviously interacted
- Ties into "juice"
- Example: Buttons should show "submitted"
- Example: Telling people when the word they're typing is invalid (even before submission)
- Provide a shared board
- In an online setting, players have much less context of what each other is doing or looking at
- Example: Showing who has submitted and who has not yet in the UI
- Design to allow players to join and leave in-game
- Party games are often played as an "appetizer" or "dessert" to a longer game night
- Short rounds (back to fast feedback) are the easiest way to make this happen
- Don't require a ton of context or score tracking
- Example: Good: Just One; Codenames. Bad: Incrypt
- Optimize the new player experience
- There's much less patience for learning a party game; no reading through a thick manual or spending 30 minutes explaining how to play
- Example: reducing all the friction to join a room
- Identify what the player should be paying attention to
- Example: Using white background when player has to input a decision
- Make player choices matter
- Party games should be uniquely driven by each player
- Example: One Word, anyone can affect the words by picking a bad one
- Everyone should have the opportunity to lob in a joke
- It's all about the story
- What will people remember from the gameplay experience? Usually not who won, but what they joked and laughed about
- Example: Company game when someone random joined, and we played with a rando Sam, and then tried to recruit them in the end through a clue
So players might be trickling in or trying to leave.
Other tips
- Reversible actions — allowing people to undo and redo
- Mod controls — progressing the game if it's stuck or not fun