Introduction

Side Channels is a multiplayer deduction style game.
It's played with at least 2 players per Team. Each teams goal is, to have all their play cards covered by any Marker card. Be it your own teams marker or one of the enemy teams.

Roles

Each Team has players of 2 Roles: Agents and Coordinators.
Each Team needs at least one of each.

There can currently only be one Coordinator per Team. There is no technical limit to the number of Agents.

Role-goals

• Coordinator: Successfully communicate what cards belong to your Team by only giving a simple hint. While preventing your teammates from marking the dark card(s).
• Agents: Successfully mark play cards, belonging to your team while avoiding neutral, enemy, and the dark card(s)

Abilities

Each Role has specific abilities:

• Coordinators are able to see the Team (Color) assigned to all the playing cards, but cannot interact with the Marker cards. They rely on the agents to place the markers on the correct play cards.
  • At the start of their Teams turn they are able to see a hint input panel. (More on Hints later)
  • They are not allowed to give further hints, than the Hint input panel allows.
• Agents are able to mark playing cards as belonging to their Team by dropping a Marker card onto it.
  • They can also use Marker coins (to be implemented) to more efficiently communicate with their teammates by marking potential matches.

Hints

Are given by your Teams Coordinator at the start of your Round.
It consists of a Word and Number.
The word cannot be a word that is on one of the playing cards (please don't try to abuse this... I can't easily check for that...).

As a small example. Say we have this simplified board:

and the Hint is: Forest 3
This tells the Agents, that 3 playing cards stand in association with "Forest".

According to that hint the Agents might mark the following cards on the board:

Agents are allowed to place one more marker than the hint number. So in this case the agents would be allowed to place 1 more marker.

Sadly "Space" wasn't one of the playing cards associated with "Forest" this also ends the round.

It is encouraged to use hint's that go beyond the literal meaning of the word.
Use of inside jokes as hints is also very much allowed and can be a lot of fun if done correctly.

If a Hint is deemed to be too obvious or illegal the round has be forfeit by intentionally covering an enemy card. This card is chosen by the enemy's coordinator. This essentially gives the Enemy Team a point and lets them get rid of one troublesome card.

• Try to avoid using compound words as hints. They can be overpowered.
  • Especially if playing a deck in a language that has very flexible compound words like German.
  • There is a length limit in place to prevent hyper specific hints.
• Translated words are not allowed as hints. Only use words in the language, that the board is in.
• The coordinator on the enemy Team has final say if a hint was way too obvious

Card Types:

There are 3 different types of play cards:

1. Neutral: Ends the turn if marked
2. Colored:
   • Continue round when successfully marking a card that belongs to your team.
   • End round if marking enemy card.
3. Dark: The Team that marks this card INSTANTLY LOOSES the game. It's the Coordinators job to prevent their Agents from marking this card.

Ending a Round.

A round can be ended in 2 ways:

1. The agents Mark a play card that does not belong to their Team. So either a Neutral (White) or a colored enemy card
2. Or by pressing the "End Round" Button.

Additional Information

• Try swapping roles and teammates after rounds. Every combination can create new and fun situations.

Card Packs

Side Channels uses a modular card pool.
What does that mean?
Simply said: it allows you to customize what playing cards can be randomly chosen and how likely they are.

Each card-pack has a capacity of cards it can provide and a probability multiplier.

Card-packs can be added or removed before each game. You can also edit their weighting/probability.

Card-Pack Types

Static

Cards with hardcoded data that have equal chance to be picked.

Dynamic

These are generated "on the fly" and will change depending on specific circumstances. These packs have a fixed or if possible dynamic capacity.

Wordlist

Cards with Words on them

Static

Examples:

• English nouns
• German nouns
• German curated (WIP)
• Prominent Reso users (WIP)
• Furry species (WIP)

Dynamic

Examples:

• Players in session
• Random time (WIP)

Meshes (WIP)

These packs provide 3D meshes to be displayed on the play card.
Examples:

• Curated sample from: The Base Mesh (WIP)
• Models from Resonite Essentials (WIP)

Graphics (WIP)

Cards displaying a texture

Static

Cards that display simple graphics
Examples:

• Free iconpacks (WIP)

Dynamic

Cards with graphics generated on the fly.
Examples:

• Selfie of a User in the Session (WIP)
• Profile Picture of User in session (WIP)
• Random Images from an API (WIP)

Custom

To create a custom cardpack, just duplicate one of the default ones.
A cardpack is called trough an AsyncDynamicImpulse on game start (depending on its weight / probability) and sends back a string through another AsyncDynamicImpulseWithReference of type String. a cardpack can send back any String. Be it a Word or asset url (not implemented jet).