Felix Lee's entry into the 2005 About.com Deduction Game Design Competition, The Green Pipe, is a finalist. Players are challenged to find the holes in their opponent's secret pipeline before the opponent finds the holes in yours. The pipelines are probed by adding colored liquid and seeing where it goes.

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

In a recent session, I played Top Secret Spies, Mystery of the Abbey, and The Great Dalmuti for the first time. Most of the players had never played any of the games before, and under those conditions Dalmuti worked the best.

The other two games were too opaque, in that it isn't very clear what you need to do to make progress, and the games' secretive aspects discourages discussion. So the gameplay had a lot of stumbling around in the dark, and it seemed to me the winners arrived at victory by accident.

Dalmuti is also somewhat opaque, but a round is short enough that you can play a dozen times in an hour. Many of the players figured out the basics after several rounds, so gameplay quickly reached a point where strategic bluffing starts to get interesting.

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

Knizia's Lord of the Rings, because I don't have a lot of experience with cooperative "beat the game" mechanics.

Please tell us about the process of designing The Green Pipe.

The Green Pipe was mainly motivated by discontent with deduction games like Mastermind. I liked those games when I was young, but they're not very interactive. There's not much for the Hider to do, and computerized Hiders lack psychological subtlety. So I wanted to make a deduction game that's interactive, while keeping it more about deduction than about bluffing.

The first draft was complicated and unplayable, and revisions were mainly about trying to simplify it without losing the interesting bits.

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

I like the name, because it's a red herring. My main disappointment is that I didn't figure out a way to put the two pipelines in the same space. My general feeling is that I didn't quite hit the target. The game isn't as simple as I wanted, it's not as interactive as I wanted, etc. There's also a logic error in the text of the example diagram, heh.