During the pandemic, it has been hard to test board games, so we started developing Pecking Order: a cut throat social game you play in Discord or Slack over the course of a week. This idea has been simmering for years as I fell deeply in love with two social games: Survivor and Codenames.

These are two very different games that both beautifully illustrate something we want to emulate: communication is the core gameplay, and there’s tremendous freedom in how players communicate. Communication is improvisational, relational, idiosyncratic, and creative. Communication can be radically different depending on the participants and the context. Communication as a game mechanism brings pre-existing human factors to the game, and offers a massive space of possibility for players to devise strategies and styles. And as a result, good social games reward creativity, and vary massively depending on who is playing.

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