Stiletto was designed with the intention of emulating the feel of college campus assassin games, where players are given targets to eliminate, usually with water balloons or nerf guns. Of course, in such games, each player is also the target of an unknown hunter. 

Early in the design process, I spent a lot of time trying to think of ways that a board game could operate with as little shared information as possible. This meant including a resource system that was opaque to one’s opponents. You might say, cards already do that. And you’d be right, but what I wanted was a system where players would acquire resources without having to reach across a table to draw a card or pick up a cube for all their opponents to see.

My solution was to create a system where players would have hands of cards with a set order, much like Bohnanza, except with considerably more murder and fewer beans. Cards could exist in hand while being inert and useless. In order to use a card, it had to be on the active side of a player's hand, that is to the right of a central card whose sole purpose was to act as a divider separating active from inactive cards. The end result was seemingly functional, and as far as I was convinced, exceptionally clever. Players could gain resources without the table being the wiser, though of course they could also cheat with ease, whether accidentally or not. I was very attached to it, and it persisted for a long portion of Stiletto’s development. 

Public playtests quickly revealed that this system of hand management was both cumbersome and very difficult to teach without adding any value to the game. However, it proved challenging to remove from the game as nearly all of the agent powers had been designed around this system of card activation. I insisted on fixing the system rather than discarding it for some time. Kill your darlings, as they say.

Unmooring the game from its card activation system left it feeling hollow and without much substance. The answer was to focus more of the game around what would become conspiracy cards. These were initially weapon cards, which only augmented murdering. Opening the concept of weapon cards to include more abstract ideas allowed for a huge number of unique cards to be made. 

A second problem was also solved in the way that they were implemented into the game. For the longest time, the easiest strategy was to collect all of the characters into the Town Square and commence a murder mosh where it was impossible to work out anyone’s identity. Conspiracies were added to the edges of the board to disincentivize this strategy, replacing the exceedingly convoluted way that players used to gain weapon cards. The Inquisitor, a roving religious hall monitor who prevents murders in his location, was another addition that provided a counter for the Town Square death ball. He was an idea that I salvaged from concepts for an asymmetrical Stiletto expansion.

Basing all agent powers around the downside of revealing that character card was also a huge step forward for the game. It meant that new players didn’t have to be intimately familiar with their agent powers to have a chance at winning. A player could entirely forget about their agent powers and focus on staying hidden instead of trying to tackle complex combinations of conspiracies and agent powers that players tend to use once they’re familiar with the game.

It was never inevitable that Stiletto was going to reach completion. From the very beginning, it had exciting core gameplay and that was enough to keep me working on it until it wasn’t a mess. There was a long period where its viability as a sellable product was questionable, but I’m glad I discarded a few mechanics and not the whole game.