Alien Mating Calls

About

4-12 Players | 10-20 minutes

Category: Party Game

Mechanisms: Acting, Communication Limits, Deduction, Hidden Roles, Real-Time

Alien Mating Calls, designed by John Velgus and self published, is a hilarious party game that combines performing, deduction, and trickery. Your goal in the game is to score points by correctly pairing up with other players - while having the severe and silly limitation of only making alien noises.

Players go around the table once, making a noise they think their randomly assigned alien might make. This is their clue to other players what alien they have. Then players simultaneously begin making their alien noises, during which each player decides to either pair up with another player by fist bumping them, or not pair up. When all players are ready to proceed, players reveal their alien cards.

Players score points based on how they paired up, with maximum points awarded to pairs of players who were alien partners and to single players who did not pair up and didn't have their partner in play. The player with the most points at the end of 6 rounds wins.

Subjective interpretations and the chance of a devious Mimic being in play makes commitment risky, and surprising misunderstandings are common. Optional Mood cards modify player calls, adding more replayability.

SERVICES PROVIDED

• Game Design

• Content Design

• Editing

PROJECT OVERVIEW

I am the designer of Alien Mating Calls and created the game from concept to published game. I did all aspects of this game including selecting which public domain art to use, editing card text, writing the rulebook, and setting up the game’s store page.

This game was concepted on a late night drive home from a San Francisco Bay Area game convention. It had to be something I could prototype quickly to be ready for the next day of open testing. The idea suddenly came to me - how about a combination performing and deduction game where players make silly alien noises!? Yeah it’s a pretty crazy idea, but I did mention it was late at night.

From the first play players were hooked. It was super funny to watch kids or often just mature adults making undefinable noises together. Immediately, it felt like 80% of the gameplay was there. The core gameplay was solid and super fun. It was easy to teach, had big emotional moments, and encouraged players to be silly - perfect for a party game.

The scoring was a design challenge. The scoring had to be fair in all cases, regardless if your matching alien partner card was in play or not, and simple enough for a fast paced party game. I came up with an elegant system where players would score 1, 2, or 3 points based on how they paired up and what was in play. By controlling the setup of each round and using the scoring system, I incentivized players to play more risky and pair up with players, even when they were less than certain.

Figuring out how to add replayability was important. Each game should feel unique and if players played this game regularly they may start to associate certain noises with certain aliens. I ended up creating 6 alien decks, one for each round of the game. Each alien deck contains 7 alien pairs and a mimic card. Only a portion of an alien deck is used in a round, even in a 12 player game, so what comes up in each playthrough will be very different. For additional replayability, I created the optional mood cards. Each round’s random mood had players changing their noise to also sound angry, flirty, or a variety of other emotions.

Project Highlight: Making Ambiguous Communication Engaging

The key design of Alien Mating Calls is the ambiguous and subjective communication. What does a pictured alien sound like? Well it’s impossible to say because the alien doesn’t exist! The subjective nature of me thinking an alien sounds a certain way, my ability to create that sound, and your interpretation of that sound creates an engaging dynamic. My later design work focused on getting the most out of ambigious communication.

While easy to miss at first glance, a lot of consideration went into selecting art. An alien image could not be too recognizable to a real life well associated sound. For example, in earlier play tests there was an alien that was similar to a duck. So what noise did players make when they had that alien? An easily recognizable duck-like quacking sound. This ruined the fun of the game. An alien noise should rarely be obvious to a player. I also needed to pay strict attention to the groups of aliens that went in a deck. No alien could be very distinct from the others in a deck in terms of the noise players would associate with it. An example here would be if only one alien had its tongue out, then players would usually only stick their tongue out when making the noise for that alien. Aliens had to have overlapping features so at best you might narrow the sounds down to a few options even when familiar with the art used in each deck.

A big design breakthrough was the mimic card. The player with the mimic card did not have a specific sound they were trying to make. Rather, the mimic player’s goal was to trick other players into pairing with it by copying their sounds. If successful, the mimic player would score maximum points while the unfortunate pairer scored nothing. The mimic added a lot of uncertainity and tension that went well with ambiguous communication. You could never be certain if a player was copying you to clue you in or to trick you. Mimic or not, sometimes you’d even want to purposely change your sound to convince players to pair with you, making play dynamics even more engaging.