Creating Texture in Hidden-Movement Search Mechanics

Traditionally, in a hidden movement game, one player moves around the board in secret while the others try to figure out where they are and catch them. If the seekers find the hider, they win. If the hider eludes them long enough, that player wins. This beloved formula has one major problem: its core mechanic, searching locations to find the hider, is inherently flat.

Texture comes from varying the ratio of effort to reward. In hidden movement, the effort is searching a space, and the typical reward is finding the hidden player. But if finding the hidden player ends the game, as in the classic Scotland Yard, it cannot provide texture during the game itself.

Some games provide clues about the hidden player's whereabouts if a seeker searches a space they visited. In Fury of Dracula, for instance, searching a location where Dracula was recently reveals that location on his trail. This is an improvement over the binary rewards of Scotland Yard but only barely.

Informational rewards in hidden movement games suffer from time decay; any information you learn quickly becomes obsolete as the hider moves and can become worthless if they throw you off their trail.

Furthermore, there is a hard limit to the value of information. The best result you can achieve is learning the actual current location of the hider, which limits the variance you as a game designer can provide in search rewards.

Since there are hard limits to the reward variance you can provide players, a more promising approach is to vary the effort so players can get the same information rewards more efficiently.

Line-of-sight mechanics are one way to create variance in effort. In Nuns on the Run, guards can see an infinite distance in a straight line unless blocked by an obstacle. Depending on where a guard stands, they may see only a few spaces or many. Smart positioning increases the number of spaces monitored, while traditional hidden movement games allow seekers to check only one space at a time.

Another way to bypass the flatness of search mechanics is to change the seekers' objective entirely. In The Stifling Dark, seekers try to find evidence on the map to expose a supernatural entity while that entity hunts them. Inverting the roles of hunter and hunted allows other goals and mechanics to become the focus.

If you are designing a hidden movement game, think carefully about whether to include search mechanics and how to provide texture if you do. There is plenty of room for innovation, so don't feel you need to stick to the same systems used before.