by Peter Hayward

[heading]Triangulation Design Diary[/heading]

Triangulation was designed in three years and four hours.

During the height of the pandemic, I had the idea: two teams, one leader on each team. The leader of Team A is trying to get their team to guess a word (e.g. orange). They write down two clues, hand them to the leader of Team B. They pick one to show to their team, and the team (without seeing the second word) make a guess.

Then, the other team sees the second word and makes a guess.

I am a huge fan of Decrypto. I’d consider it a perfect game, except it has one flaw: it’s a nightmare to teach. I’m always the one teaching games, which has given me SUCH an affection for games that make my life easier.

Decrypto, for all its brilliance, does the opposite. But you can see in the above my attempt to make an easier-to-teach Decrypto. I called it Hash, based on my limited understanding of cybersecurity.

The game didn’t work: ‘two clues to guess any word in the world’ is too much of a challenge, and the four-step process was far too much work for a party game. In trying to simplify Decrypto, I’d managed to make something even less intuitive. Impressive!

But there was something there. In one playtest, my friend Sean gave the perfect set of two clues:

—Tiny
—Arms

In isolation, neither of them mean anything, but together? Everyone immediately, correctly, guessed T. Rex. It was everything I wanted from the game—the idea was working, I just didn’t know how to execute it.

But what if I could make that moment repeatable? I brought Hash out for my design group a few times before eventually joining my pile of ‘Cool idea, pity it doesn’t work’ ideas, like Future Traders or For Every Card, There Is A Season.

Years passed, until one day, the solution came to me:

Three.

The original idea relied on the opponent’s team leader to choose which clue to give, so you couldn’t just write “Big scary dinosaur, you know the one, the first one you’re thinking of” on one card and “Ignore this clue” on the other. In an attempt to solve the “wow that’s a lot of steps” problem, I’d tried skipping the selection phase, having the player just shuffle their two cards and reveal one.

Even with a 50/50 chance of revealing the ‘good’ clue, I found that players were happy to take that chance. The tricksy thing about players is that if you offer them a choice between ‘engaging with the game in a fun way’ and ‘winning’, they’ll almost always choose winning. Humans are just wired like that—not a criticism, just a fact.

90% of design fighting against this human impulse, and ensuring the engaging, fun way to play your game is also the winning path.

Two? People were happy to take a 50/50 cance. But three?

If you had to write three clues, then you could reveal two to the other team before your own team guesses, and your chance of randomly having the ‘one good clue’ be the last one given was only 33%—well below the threshold of “Oh I’ll just chance it”.

I threw some whiteboards in a bag, went to a playtest day, and four hours later, the game I’d been chasing for years was working.

I’ve never had a game come together so quickly. Now, those four hours stood on the shoulders of three years of thinking about it, and I was extremely fortunate to spend those hours with several of the best designers I know. But even so: everything clicked so quickly, and it almost immediately became my favorite of my own designs.

(I knew I was onto something when I later showed the game to Alex Cutler, my frequent co-designer, and immediately after playing, he swore. A jealous “Damn you, this is perfect” is still the best design compliment I’ve ever received.)

For the first hour or two of playtesting, I was just throwing words out: “soap”, “apple”, “the Pope”. And I was lucky to be playtesting with Damon Stea, who spotted that round with “The Pope” as the answer was far more interesting than any of the clues that came before or after it.

What if all the words were proper nouns?

Not only did this improve the game (Design tip: try to improve your game) but it gave it a point of difference. Aside from Charades and similar games (Monikers, Time’s Up) I couldn’t think of any ‘guess the word’ games that only included proper nouns as the answers.

This made the development process so much more complicated (shoutout to John Brieger, Jeff Fraser, Breeze Grigas, and Joe Wiggins for the countless hours they’ve spent refining and playtesting the word list) but was absolutely worth it. In the final game, you draw a card with six options and choose one to clue each round.

A fun quirk of Triangulation is that you can’t work out the perfect set of clues and use them again if the word comes back around. If everyone knows them, the other team does too… and they get to guess first.

My girlfriend loves horses, so I pitched Triangulation to Allplay with a horse theme (Triple Crown, you’re trying to communicate the name of the winning horse without anyone else realizing what you’re doing). I don’t think Joe has ever hated a theme so much, and my second pitch (Triple-Factor Authentication) wasn’t much better.

Instead, Joe hired the incomparable Kwanchai Moriya to bring it into a neon world of 80’s hackers instead. Getting to work with Kwanchai has been a decade-long aspiration come true.

There’s nothing else quite like Triangulation, and the design process is unlike anything I’ve worked on before. After three years with no progress, it fell into place in four hours, and it gives me hope that one day, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and figure out the missing piece to make my other shelved games work. Maybe Future Traders has a future!