Lies

"Oh, what a web we weave when we seek to deceive!" It's always seemed to me that this web might form the basis of an interesting game. I designed such a game once, using a contrived situation in which eight jewel thieves spy on each other and attempt to determine which one of them currently possesses the jewel. Knowing who has the jewel makes it possible to steal the jewel. The thieves can also tell each other about the whereabouts of third parties at specified times, but these statements might easily be lies. The game provides the player with a handy-dandy visual tool I called "Visi-Lie," which graphically showed all the logical relationships among the various observations and statements that the player has collected. This game plays rather like a vastly expanded version of the old boardgame Clue. Indeed, a nice variation could be built around a murder mystery. The central design problem is to provide different agendas for each person so as to encourage lying without obvious causes for the lying.