The Village - A Social Deduction Game

I have a class of academically gifted young high school students. Here in Australia, they are year 7, which makes them on average around 13 years old. It would be fair to say that since these kids are targeted as "gifted and talented" many are socially awkward, and more than a few share traits that they're probably on the Autistic spectrum at some level. I've already posted a few times about the high school gaming club I ran a few years ago, and since I'm currently unable to run this (for ongoing reasons that have now been a concern for 2.5 years), I've decided to experiments with a social deduction game using this class of students.

The reasons are basically two-fold...

  1. A lot of the kids are smart, they work things out really quickly, and understand how connected systems can impact on one another.
  2. There has been a lack of social cohesion among them and I've wanted to get a sense of fun and community back into the class as we wind down toward the end of the Australian school year.

I've based the game on a few of the ideas I had quite some time ago, but have modified things a bit for this group. The previous game I made in this vein was simply called NOIR, it was a project back in 2017. I did it as a NaGaDeMon project just after I'd come back from a stint as a prac teacher, where one of the other members of our group had devised his own version of a game in the social deduction genre. 

A lot of the same ideas still hold true. I ran the numbers back then, and there's only a few changes based on the way things are running now. 

As a social deduction game, I'm running it at a snail's pace. One turn per day, at the start of the day during the ten minutes we call "roll call" or "check in". Like the logistica; issues I faced when running 30 players through regular half-hour weekly sessions as a part of a games, this new paradigm establishes a new range of challenges to overcome. I'll look at some of these challenges and methods for overcoign thes issues in the next few days. 

 

 

 

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