Avoid Balanced Questions in Deduction Games

In Blood on the Clocktower, the Artist role gets to ask one yes-or-no question per game. Artists often ask, "Is the Demon one of the following players?" naming half the room. This is a good default; whether the answer is "yes" or "no", it eliminates half the players from suspicion. It is also rather boring.

Contrast this with the Gossip, who makes a statement each day that kills someone if true. The difference between true and false gives players a reason to be more creative. Having asymmetries between true and false matters. Without it, your game may feel like rote crossing off possibilities from a list.

Attaching different consequences to true and false creates this asymmetry. In Logic and Lore, you ask questions until you get a "yes," encouraging you to hunt for "no." In Cryptid, it is the reverse: when you get a "no" answer, you must reveal some information. Encouraging players to confirm or refute a hypothesis leads to more pointed, interesting questions.

Another approach is to use pre-made statements that give a lot of information if true but little if false. In my game, Legends of the Boatman, I noticed that asymmetric payoffs are great for testing whether a statement is true. The game gives players three statements and tells them that one of them is false. A statement like "Bob is the Boatman" is extremely useful if true but pretty useless if false. However, proving it false is easier than for something like "One of these five players is the Boatman." If all three statements have asymmetric payoffs, then the false statement is the test, and the true statements are the reward for passing it.

When designing games based on true/false statements, try to avoid efficiency. You do not want your game to devolve into a binary search tree. If players ask questions, you want them to predict their answers. If they test statements, you want those statements to have asymmetric payoffs.