Description
Reasoning by process of elimination to discover a crucial piece of information.
Discussion
Deduction is a familiar mechanism from mass-market classics like Clue and Guess Who?, as well as informal games like 20 Questions, Jotto, and Bulls and Cows. In these games, deduction is nearly the whole of the gameplay. Players are racing to solve the puzzle either before their opponents or before their time and resources run out. Deduction games typically fall into one of a few structures. Most deduction games have a central mystery that all players are trying to solve. A few games feature a puzzlemaster, a player who knows the solution, and one or more players who are trying to solve the puzzle. The role of the puzzlemaster may be oppositional, supportive, or neutral. In another approach, each player may be solving their own personal puzzle, and sometimes players are both puzzlemasters trying to prevent others from solving a puzzle they’re charged with defending, while simultaneously racing to solve another puzzle.
A hallmark of deduction games, and a key consideration in their design, is in the choice of affordances that are provided to the players to track their deduction process. Paper pads are a common approach, as in Sleuth and the aforementioned Clue. Mastermind’s board and pegs system is perhaps the most famous method of tracking guesses. It may therefore come as no surprise that the game was initially published by Invicta Plastics, a plastic toy company that took a chance on Mordecai Meirowitz’s unusual design. While deducing the identity of a murderer or the value of a specific card is common, some games employ a spatial approach. In Tobago, players close in on the location of a treasure located somewhere on an island. Rules cards specify, for example, that the treasure must be on a particular terrain, like the mountains, or in the largest region of type of terrain, or within a few spaces of a feature like an idol. With each rules card played, the possible locations of the treasure shrink. When only a single valid location exists, the treasure may be recovered. Tobago uses deductive reasoning, but because players decide which rules cards to play, they are not deducing where the treasure might be. Rather, they are determining, based on their card choice, where the treasure will be found. Tobago’s approach is quite fun and refreshing, but a later game, Cryptid, uses a very similar engine to drive a more traditional deduction game. In Cryptid, each player holds clues about the location of the eponymous creature. These clues are structured like Tobago’s rules cards. With each turn, a player asks another about a specific board location, and that player responds by placing a disc on the board if they cannot rule that location out, or a cube if they can. The key distinction between the two games is that in Tobago, the location of the treasure is not fixed prior to play. Rather, the rules cards eventually force the treasure to resolve its location to a single valid space. In Cryptid, the monster is in a specific place, and each play of the game is chosen from a very large set of puzzles, with the corresponding deck of clues distributed to players to match. From a design perspective, Cryptid requires creating many puzzles, while Tobago is, in a sense, a means of generating those puzzles. Word-association and image-association games like Mysterium, French Toast, and Codenames share a lot in common with deduction. Players use evidence to narrow their choices, but the evidence is far less definitive than pure logical deduction should provide. Social deduction games, which we cover under their own heading, also introduce uncertainty into the deduction process. Just as adding randomness into a game will tend to lower its
weight and increase the chances that a less-skilled player will win, attenuating the effectiveness of pure reasoning will make a game lighter and less competitively balanced. Many games call for deductive reasoning, though they may not be classified as deduction games. Hidden movement games, e.g., Hunt for the Ring, rely heavily on deduction, as do games with pawns that have hidden values, like Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. Cooperative and team games with communication limits, like Decrypto, Trapwords, and Hanabi also call for players to use deductive reasoning skills. And just about every numbers-oncards game, from trick-takers to rummy-style games to poker-style games calls for card-counting and deduction to be played at a high level. While we don’t see these as specifically using a deduction mechanism, they share many features.
Sample Games
Clue (Pratt, 1949) Codenames (Chvátil, 2015)l Cryptic (Duncan and Veevers, 2018) Decrypto (Dagenais-Lespérance, 2018) French Toast (Hayward, 2021) Guess Who? (Coster and Coster, 1979) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) Hunt for the Ring (Maggi, Mari and Nepitello, 2017) Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Knizia, Lang and Peterson, 2005) Mastermind (Meirowitz, 1971) Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015) Sleuth (Sackson, 1971) Tobago (Allen, 2009) Trapwords (Chvátil, 2018)
描述
通过排除过程进行推理以发现关键信息。
讨论
演绎（Deduction）是大众市场经典游戏如《Clue》和《Guess Who?》以及非正式游戏如《20 Questions》、《Jotto》和《Bulls and Cows》中常见的机制。在这些游戏中，演绎几乎是游戏的全部。玩家争先在对手之前或在时间和资源耗尽之前解决谜题。演绎游戏通常属于几种结构之一。大多数演绎游戏都有一个核心谜团，所有玩家都在试图解开。少数游戏有一名谜题大师，一名知道解决方案的玩家，以及一名或多名试图解决谜题的玩家。谜题大师的角色可能是对立的、支持的或中立的。在另一种方法中，每个玩家可能都在解决自己的个人谜题，有时玩家既是试图阻止他人解决他们负责捍卫的谜题的谜题大师，同时也竞相解决另一个谜题。
演绎游戏的一个标志，也是设计中的一个关键考虑因素，是选择提供给玩家以跟踪其演绎过程的功能。纸垫是一种常见的方法，如在《Sleuth》和上述的《Clue》中。《Mastermind》的棋盘和钉子系统也许是最著名的跟踪猜测的方法。因此，该游戏最初由Invicta Plastics出版也就不足为奇了，这是一家塑料玩具公司，在Mordecai Meirowitz不同寻常的设计上冒了险。虽然推断凶手的身份或特定卡牌的价值很常见，但有些游戏采用了空间方法。在《Tobago》中，玩家逐渐接近位于岛上各处的宝藏位置。例如，规则卡规定宝藏必须在特定地形上，如山脉，或在最大类型的地形区域中，或在像偶像这样的特征的几个空间内。随着每张规则卡的打出，宝藏的可能位置会缩小。当只存在一个有效位置时，宝藏就可以被收回。《Tobago》使用演绎推理，但因为玩家决定打哪张规则卡，他们不是在推断宝藏可能在哪里。相反，他们基于卡牌选择确定将在哪里找到宝藏。《Tobago》的方法非常有趣和新鲜，但后来的游戏《Cryptid》使用非常相似的引擎来驱动更传统的演绎游戏。在《Cryptid》中，每个玩家都持有关于同名生物位置的线索。这些线索的结构类似于《Tobago》的规则卡。每一回合，玩家向另一名玩家询问特定的棋盘位置，如果那名玩家不能排除该位置，则在棋盘上放置一个圆盘，如果能排除，则放置一个方块。两款游戏的关键区别在于，在《Tobago》中，宝藏的位置在游戏前并不固定。相反，规则卡最终迫使宝藏将其位置解析为单个有效空间。在《Cryptid》中，怪物在一个特定的地方，游戏的每一局都是从一大组谜题中选择的，相应的线索牌堆分发给玩家以进行匹配。从设计角度来看，《Cryptid》需要创建许多谜题，而《Tobago》从某种意义上说是一种生成这些谜题的手段。像《Mysterium》、《French Toast》和《Codenames》这样的单词联想和图像联想游戏与演绎有很多共同点。玩家使用证据来缩小他们的选择范围，但证据远不如纯逻辑演绎应该提供的那么明确。我们在自己的标题下涵盖的社交推理游戏也在演绎过程中引入了不确定性。正如在游戏中增加随机性往往会降低其
权重并增加技术较差玩家获胜的机会一样，减弱纯推理的有效性将使游戏更轻松，竞争平衡性更低。许多游戏要求演绎推理，尽管它们可能不被归类为演绎游戏。隐藏移动游戏，如《Hunt for the Ring》，在很大程度上依赖演绎，就像拥有隐藏值棋子的游戏一样，如《魔戒对决》（Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation）。具有通信限制的合作和团队游戏，如《Decrypto》、《Trapwords》和《花火》，也要求玩家使用演绎推理技能。实际上，几乎所有的数字卡牌游戏，从吃墩游戏到拉米风格游戏再到扑克风格游戏，都要求算牌和演绎才能达到高水平。虽然我们不认为这些专门使用了演绎机制，但它们有许多共同特征。
游戏范例
Clue (Pratt, 1949) - 《妙探寻凶/Clue》 Codenames (Chvátil, 2015) - 《行动代号》 Cryptic (Duncan and Veevers, 2018) - 《Cryptic》 Decrypto (Dagenais-Lespérance, 2018) - 《截码战》 French Toast (Hayward, 2021) - 《French Toast》 Guess Who? (Coster and Coster, 1979) - 《猜猜他是谁》 Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) - 《花火》 Hunt for the Ring (Maggi, Mari and Nepitello, 2017) - 《Hunt for the Ring》 Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Knizia, Lang and Peterson, 2005) - 《魔戒对决》 Mastermind (Meirowitz, 1971) - 《珠玑妙算》 Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015) - 《诡秘庄园》 Sleuth (Sackson, 1971) - 《Sleuth》 Tobago (Allen, 2009) - 《Tobago》 Trapwords (Chvátil, 2018) - 《Trapwords》