For a little clip of our gameplay check out: https://vimeo.com/454237883
The game started off slowly, with all the players having the same amount of cards in their hand, which did not last for long because everyone was just itching to cheat. Some cheats were called out, some weren’t, the lucky ones got away and the very unlucky ones had to take 10+ cards just for one lie.
The players were ready to put their lying skills to the test. Some players tried to play honestly and put down one card when they had a match, others tried to sneakily put down 2 cards when they had neither match, one player kept trying to confuse everyone by throwing the count off and saying things such as “one King” when the counter was on 10s.
There are a few mechanics that I enjoyed in this game one of which was memory; remembering what cards were played when someone took all the cards, you know (approximately assuming not all of them were lies) the cards that one specific person is holding, and the cards that all the others are not holding. Another mechanic I enjoyed was the bluffing used when you don’t have the certain card that is up next, so you have to put down a random card and hope no one calls you out on it. Those were the two mechanics that gave me an edge over the people I was playing Cheat with.
I also wanted to say that I played a game similar to this one, called BS where you have to call out the other players when they are lying when I was a kid at summer camp. At summer camp though when you play with a bunch of other kids, there are serious mind games going on, but during class it was a lot more straightforward.
As you can see the gameplay can get very intense, but repetitive the only time the game got exciting was when people would accuse someone else for cheating. However, I noticed at during our first that we went almost 3 rounds (15 cards put down) without anyone calling cheat and then finally someone did. I think this is one of the mechanics of the game where there are a lot of cards theres a lot of risk, which means one person has to sacrifice their chance of winning for the sake of the game to continue so they themselves can win. My favorite strategy in this game was to put down 2 cards when I for sure had one, hoping that no one had 3 of them (I was pushing my luck for sure)!