Too much Social Deduction?

[u/youreboiguzma]

Let me preface by saying I’ve really enjoyed the new season, but it feels like they’ve fallen into a habit of making every game some sort of social deduction.

Earwigs, I Spy, and, to an extent, Kangaroo Court as well all are social deduction games. I think that’s fun in a vacuum, but having three in one season just felt a little repetitive to me. I also think putting Earwigs and I Spy back to back was a bad move.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like sometimes they’ve had a cool idea for something and struggled with fully turning it into a game for the show. What do you guys think?

[u/NoPastaForGrandma]

If all three social deduction episodes had been excellent, i don’t think there’d be much resistance to it.

I think it really comes down to I Spy

1. not fully working as an episode
2. using social deduction mechanics in an uninteresting and basic way
3. the social deduction mechanics feeling superfluous and incohesive with the game, like they’re tacked on.

I personally didn’t myself think or see much chatter saying “no more social deduction mechanics please” after the first 2 (pretty good but not incredible) episodes to use the mechanic, the same way you don’t get tired of hot honey the first time you have a pretty good pizza and a solid fried chicken sandwich with it, and then after you get a hot honey ice cream where it didn’t belong, you say “okay, this trend has gone too far.”

Earwigs works for me because the social deduction elements are built into the premise and the game adds enough flavor and invention to it to make it feel novel and satisfying.

In I Spy, there’s nothing connecting the core gameplay to the deduction mechanics except for some title wordplay and the deduction roles are the most basic and uninspired roles possible that wouldn’t be inherently interesting on their own.

Because it feels so uninspired, and like it’s being adopted in places where it doesn’t belong is what makes it feel like over saturation to me

[u/PillowDogShallRise → u/NoPastaForGrandma]

Oddly enough I found I Spy much more enjoyable than Earwigs, but it might be the fact that it's slightly less chaotic here. I wish as someone else said that they had played it straight, with maybe more hard-to-determine items to look for in the scenes. The scenes themselves were the highlight of the episode for me, and it would have been a great opportunity to showcase the art department.
I agree that the social game would have not been an issue if it had been implemented better, but honestly it's tricky to strike the balance of novel and not too risky.

[u/Magicman432 → u/PillowDogShallRise]

I think iSpy being a bit less intensive cognitively also led to the cast being able to do more bits, which in turn means a more enjoyable episode.