Sketchy Spies - Hearing agnostic card game - case study

A UX & Product Case Study - Designing a Hearing-Agnostic Social Deduction Game

Context · Ludic Design module, PGD-DPDM cohort |

Supporting Institutions: IIIT Bangalore X Enable India Bangalore

Format · Physical card game  |  Players · 4–8  |  Ages · 13+  |  Type · Visual social deduction

A game where Deaf and hearing players compete as equals — same circle, same rules, no translation layer, no accessibility bolted on at the end.

The Challenge

Social deduction games - Werewolf, Mafia, Codenames - run on talk. The fun lives in verbal cross-examination: accusing, defending, bluffing out loud. That single assumption quietly excludes Deaf players, or drops them into a "captioned" version stitched on afterwards.

Our brief asked for a ludic artefact satisfying three principles - inclusivity, learning, and accessibility. We set a sharper constraint than the brief demanded: one game a mixed group of Deaf and hearing teenagers could play in the same circle, by the same rules, where neither group is the special case.

The Lens: Ludic Design

Our module was grounded in ludic design - the practice of designing for play as an end in itself: for curiosity, exploration, tension, and intrinsic delight, rather than for efficiency or task-completion. A ludic artefact doesn't just transmit information; it invites people to engage, experiment, and feel something. That framing mattered here, because it meant accessibility couldn't be treated as a functional checklist - the game had to be equally fun for everyone, not merely equally usable.

The module distilled ludic design into three criteria, and each is visible in the final game:

• Play - Hidden roles (Spy, Minion, everyone else) manufacture fun, tension, and social interaction. The stakes are trivial; the drama is the point.

• Learning - Building non-repeating visual clues around a concept quietly exercises creativity, memory, and conceptual understanding - you have to know an aeroplane to keep drawing new, valid parts of it.

• Accessible design - Play flows entirely through drawing, facial expression, and gesture, with no speech required. Visual clues and observation replace the spoken debate that normally gates these games.

Ludic design is also why we refused a separate Deaf mode: a game whose joy is unequally distributed fails the ludic test before it fails the accessibility one. One table, one shared source of delight.

The design-thinking arc below - Empathise → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test → Iterate - is the spine of how we turned that lens into a working deck.

1. Empathise - the conversation that set our direction

Before sketching a single mechanic, we sat down with a senior from our own PGD cohort - Karan(name changed), who is deaf and communicates through writing, typing, and Indian Sign Language. The reason for involving Karan at such early stage of game development was that we wanted accessibility to be a source of the design, not a repair job on top of it.

Us: What's it actually like joining game night with hearing friends?

Karan: (typing) I can play, but I'm always half a step behind. The real game is the arguing. By the time someone writes down what was said, the moment is gone. I stop being a player and become an audience.

Us: So the fix is captions? Sign-language cards?

Karan: That's the trap. The second you make a "Deaf version," you've told me I'm playing a different game than everyone else. I don't want a ramp beside the stairs. I want a door everyone uses.

Us: We were considering charades-style gestures as the core mechanic.

Karan: Careful. Gesture-guessing collapses into words — people shout the answer. And a gesture means different things to different people. Drawing is more neutral. Honestly, doodling is something a lot of us already love and do together.

Us: And the discussion - the accusing part?

Karan: That's where Deaf people are better, not worse. We read faces and body language for a living. If you made the argument silent - pure expression - you'd be handing us the advantage for once.

Three insights fell out of that hour, and each became a load-bearing design decision:

• No parallel mode. One shared ruleset for everyone, or it isn't inclusive.

• Drawing over gesture as the expressive medium - neutral, language-independent, and already culturally comfortable.

• Silence as a feature, not a limitation - turn facial expression and body language into the core of the deduction phase.

2. Define - the problem, sharpened

How might we build a fast, funny social-deduction game whose two engines - expression and accusation - carry zero linguistic or auditory dependency, so a mixed-ability group plays as one?

Two design guardrails followed directly:

1. Every channel of play must be visual or physical - never spoken or heard.

2. No mechanic may segregate the table into Deaf and hearing sub-groups.

3. Ideate - where a rejected idea proved the thesis

Brainstorming surfaced the obvious candidate - gestures/charades - and we deliberately killed it, for exactly the reasons Karan named: gestures are subjective and tend to require spoken words to resolve, which reintroduces the audio dependency we were trying to design out.

Drawing won. It leaves a permanent, colour-coded, tamper-proof record - because each player uses a different coloured marker, nobody can lie about what they drew. The evidence sits on the table, visible and equal to all. We wrapped it in a light social-deduction shell: a hidden Spy who doesn't know the secret word, a Minion working for the Spy, and everyone else trying to unmask them.

4. Prototype - the game we built

Roles & goals. Players get the word + hints (e.g., Aeroplane → wings, sky, pilot). The Spy gets only the category (Transportation) and must bluff a drawing while guessing the word. The Minion knows the word but must act suspicious and get voted out to win for the Spy's side.

Three phases, all non-verbal:

• Phase 1 — Drawing (3 rounds): each player has ~20 seconds to add one clue related to the word. You may not repeat a symbol — if someone drew a wing, you draw a window, a cloud, a seat. This forces deeper knowledge and exposes the Spy, who runs out of safe guesses.

• Phase 2 — Silent Discussion (30 sec): no talking, no writing, no signing. Only faces, body language, and pointing. This is the accusation engine — Karan's insight made literal.

• Phase 3 — The Pointed Vote: on a silent finger countdown, everyone points at their suspect. Most votes flips their card.

Cheap and forgiving by design: the "canvas" can be paper, a slate, or even sand, and seating is a semi-circle so every face is readable.

5. Test - what playtesters told us

We ran the deck with live players. It landed — the format was enjoyed across the board — but two pointed critiques shaped our roadmap.

Feedback 1 - "Why not gestures?"
Some players felt gestures could replace drawing. We had already reasoned through this in ideation: gestures are more subjective and often need words to "guess," which breaks the hearing-agnostic goal. Interestingly, other players pushed back in our favour — noting that drawing is genuinely enjoyable and a common, comfortable activity among Deaf players. Rather than dismiss the split, we're treating it as a hypothesis to test head-to-head.

Feedback 2 - "It'll get repetitive."
A physical deck caps how many themes we can ship, and a fixed word list eventually bores players. Letting people scribble new words onto cards would just wear the paper out. The real need is modularity — a durable way to keep the content fresh — and any solution must still honour inclusivity, learning, and accessibility, and must never split the table into separate Deaf and hearing groups.

6. Next Steps

• A/B the medium. Run drawing-vs-gesture rounds with the same groups to settle Feedback 1 with evidence, not opinion.

• Solve modularity. Prototype wipe-clean blank cards and a small "theme-pack" system so groups expand the deck without degrading it — keeping content generation a shared, table-wide activity.

• Tiered word decks. Easy/medium/hard categories to stretch replayability and the learning goal.

• Accessibility hardening. High-contrast, dyslexia-friendly typography and colour-blind-safe marker sets, tested with a wider Deaf-player group via a school or NGO partner.

• Broaden the sample. Move beyond our cohort to genuinely mixed-ability sessions and measure whether both groups report equal agency.

The Team

Six of us, one shared commitment to accessibility running through every role:

The takeaway

Sketchy Spies works because accessibility wasn't a constraint we accommodated - it was the insight we designed around. We didn't make a game and then make it Deaf-friendly. We asked a Deaf player what he was locked out of, and built the game out of the answer.