Heinrich Glumpler's Hide and Guess, in which players use chess pieces to create a secret and then guess their opponent's secret, is a finalist in the 2005 About.com Deduction Game Design Competition. Glumpler is a successful published game designer, with games like Street Illegal, Feurio! and Techno Witches to his credit. He also entered our 2003 Simultaneous Movement Game Design Competition with King of Pearls.

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

I do not often play other games except my own prototypes and in fact the last game that I played recently was the only one for quite some time: Oltremare. I liked playing it -- and as usual I automatically tried to find out why I liked it. I think it was the fact that each player has to make hard decisions each turn which have a major influence on what he can do in the next turn. Really nice game!

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

Caylus already was named the "better Puerto Rico" -- so I am curious about this one, although I am not to eager to play this type of games -- probably I am just eager to analyze it's mechanism.

Please tell us about the process of designing Hide & Guess.

I started with the material since this was a prerequisite. Since it should be a deduction game I continued with the secret. It seemed natural to me that both players create a secret to be solved by the opponent -- this would ensure that both players had their fun with the game. Chess pieces provided a big enough variety in creating a secret by allowing a lot of combination of pieces.

I wanted to rule out luck as far as possible eliminating all kind of deduction games that could be solved by a simple hit at the start of the game -- additionally I wanted to create a dilemma where each player had to give away some information to gain an insight in the others secret.

Because of this I created the "triangle" -- each player assigns a certain number of points to each triangle to gain a maximum of points... simultaneously giving away the information which of these triangles are precious to him and thus giving information about his own hidden secret.

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

I am experimenting a lot when designing a game. What I liked especially was the fact that the dilemma that I wanted to create really worked as I soon found out when playing the game with my girlfriend.

I would have liked to improve the game insofar as I would liked to make it less "German" -- meaning: it should have a theme. The way it is, it is a pure abstract game. But in fact I deemed it more important to test the mechanism to ensure that it works -- if I had had the time I surely would have searched for a fitting theme.