You Shouldn’t Design Around Cheaters

Some games make cheating difficult, while others make it almost impossible. In a deterministic game like chess, you cannot cheat because your opponent will catch you. In a social deduction game like Werewolf, you just need to peek during the night to gain an unfair advantage without anyone knowing. In the hidden movement genre, some players complain that it is too easy to cheat by rewriting their movement history. Should we prevent this as game designers?

The short answer is no, we should not. Building auditing systems into board games adds complexity that does not enhance the play experience and is pointless. True, a cheater can ruin a game for others, but that is a problem with the cheater, not the game. If we bloat games to prevent cheaters, the play experience of non-cheaters suffers too.

When you do not police cheating in your game rules, you open many gameplay options impossible in a self-auditing game. For example, many trick-taking games force players to play certain cards if they have them, relying on players honestly reporting whether they have a particular suit. Likewise, social deduction games rely on players not revealing their role cards to others. Replicating these mechanics with built-in audits creates extra upkeep and component bloat, and some mechanics become impossible.

One instance to consider auditing mechanisms is accidental cheating, also known as rules mistakes. These are especially dangerous in games where a player with unique knowledge must correctly interpret the rules, such as coop games with information economies or logic games like Cryptid.

At the very least, it is good to include mechanisms that help players realize that they got a rule wrong. In my game Junkernauts, many bots have special abilities that break commonly forgotten rules, so players eventually realize they are playing incorrectly. For example, the Warmmonger can move diagonally, signaling players they ordinarily cannot. Players making rules mistakes is not the end of the world; the important thing is they eventually learn the correct interpretation.