Four Questions with René Wiersma

René Wiersma's Liar!, a finalist in the 2005 About.com Deduction Game Design Competition, challenges players to determine the identity of a card placed face down in the middle of the table. They take turns askin each other questions; the twist is that each player can lie once during the game.

What's your favorite recently played (for the first time) game?

Me and the gang recently went to the game fair in Essen and collectively bought a dozen new games, and a handful of second hand games. There are quite a few we still have to try out, but of the ones we have played I liked Acquire a lot. It's a very slick design, with exciting gameplay. Quite astonishing to think this was designed by Sid Sackson in the 1960s! It feels so modern.

What game do you want to play most that you haven't played yet?

There's a lot of positive buzz surrounding Caylus, and I'd love to play it myself to see how good it really is. Another game I would like to play sometime soon is Traumfabrik, which I bought at Essen, but haven't been able to play yet. It's an auction game designed by Reiner Knizia, with a fun movie theme.

Please tell us about the process of designing Liar!.

Liar! is loosely based on another deduction game I had been working on. The first version of Liar! used sixteen cards, instead of nine, and you had to keep track of clues on a piece of paper, because you simply couldn't remember every answer. The kind of question you could ask depended on the suit of the card you played, and you had to look it up on a small chart.

Needless to say, most of the development work involved simplifying the game and morphing it into the slick little card game it is now. It was a fairly quick job, though. This is one of those games where the design almost suggested itself.

The biggest challenge was making the game actually fun for two players. Most deduction games that rely on the "missing card" principle need at least three players to work. With two players, if you find out that your opponent doesn't hold a certain card, and you don't have that card in your hand either, you immediately know that that card is the "missing card". That way, a two-player deduction game often comes down to who is the first to make the lucky guess.

The "liar" element was added later during development to counteract this phenomenon, and to add a bit of bluff and psychology to the game. As a bonus, it adds another path to victory to the design as well!

What do you like about your entry, and do you think there's anything that could be improved?

What I like about Liar! is that it looks like there's very little to it, but after playing it a few times you start to see that there are quite a few things you have to keep in mind when playing, and that the choices you have to make aren't always as straightforward as they might appear at first glance. The fact that you may lie once during the game when answering a question adds an interesting, evil twist to the game, which keeps it exciting and fresh.

When designing a game my goal is always to keep the design very compact, with as few rules and components as possible, and a short playing time. With Liar!, I suprised even myself in that regard, as the game has only a handful of rules and uses just nine cards. It has tough decisions and multiple paths to victory, and plays in just a few minutes. I'm usually fairly critical of my own designs, but I honestly wouldn't know how to improve this little game.