When designers talk about the materials from which games are built, we usually mean rules, actions, resources, cards, dice, maps and objectives. Information is easy to overlook because it does not always have a physical component of its own. Yet every decision a player makes depends on information: what they know about the current state of the game, what they know about other players, what they can infer, what they are allowed to keep secret, and what they know they still do not know.
Chess makes almost everything visible. Poker would collapse if every hand were visible. In Clue, discovering information is one of the central activities of the game, while in Werewolf the information is distributed asymmetrically between players. In Alibi, information functions almost like a currency: conversations, questions and exchanges are valuable because they reveal pieces of a larger mystery. These games do not simply contain different amounts of information. They assign information different roles.
That distinction matters because changing the flow of information can change a game even when none of its other rules change. Reveal an opponent’s hand and a bluffing game becomes a calculation. Hide the board state and a strategy game can become guesswork. Give every player the same objective and they may converge on the same priorities; give them private objectives and suddenly the same shared situation can produce different interpretations. Information is therefore not merely something players need in order to operate the system. It is one of the materials from which the experience itself is constructed.
The question is not how much information to give, but which information
It is tempting to place games on a simple spectrum between perfect information and hidden information. At one end sits chess, where both players can see the complete position. At the other are games built around concealed hands, secret identities or undiscovered information. That distinction is useful, but it does not tell us enough.
The more important design question is which pieces of information are available to which players, and at what moment. A poker player knows their own cards but not the opponent’s. In Werewolf, some players know identities that others do not. In Ticket to Ride, everyone can see the routes already claimed on the board, but destination tickets remain private. A player can therefore read part of an opponent’s position while still being uncertain about what that position is trying to accomplish.
This selective visibility is what allows information to shape decisions. If everything relevant were visible in Poker, much of the bluffing, inference and risk would disappear. If the traitor’s identity in a hidden-role game were known from the beginning, suspicion would cease to be part of the experience. If every participant in a murder mystery began with every clue, there would be no reason to investigate or negotiate for information.
The opposite extreme is not automatically better. If players know too little to distinguish between their options, a decision may stop feeling strategic and begin to feel arbitrary. The goal is not to hide as much as possible, but to provide enough information for players to form a judgment while preserving enough uncertainty that the judgment still matters.
Unequal information creates different realities at the same table
Asymmetric information is especially powerful because it means that players can occupy the same game state while understanding it differently. Each player acts on a version of reality that contains some information other players do not possess.
Secret identity games make this explicit. In Werewolf or The Resistance, the truth exists, but it is distributed unevenly. One player knows that another is an ally; someone else can only infer it from behavior. A statement can therefore carry different meanings for different people, not because the rules are unclear but because their knowledge is different.
That structure does more than create surprise. It creates interaction. Players have reasons to observe one another, interpret behavior, ask questions, reveal information selectively and sometimes misrepresent what they know. The hidden information becomes socially active because it affects how players understand one another.
The same principle can work without secret identities. A private objective gives one player a reason to value a board position differently from everyone else. A hidden hand changes what threats are credible. A private clue can turn conversation into exchange. In each case, information changes the player’s incentives before it changes the visible game state.
This is why asymmetric information should not be treated simply as a way to prevent players from knowing the answer. Its more interesting function is that it allows different players to have different reasons for acting inside the same system.
Secret objectives do more than hide points
I once recommended adding secret objectives to a game not because it needed more bluffing, and not because it lacked uncertainty. The problem was that the players agreed too easily. They saw the same information, evaluated it through the same incentives and repeatedly reached the same conclusions. The game was becoming a collaborative exercise in which everyone had a reason to push in roughly the same direction.
A secret objective can break that symmetry. Suddenly two players can look at the same opportunity and value it differently. One may genuinely believe that the group should pursue a particular course because it also advances a private goal. Another may oppose it for equally rational reasons. The disagreement does not need to be manufactured through arbitrary conflict; it emerges because the players are optimizing against slightly different information and incentives.
This can be particularly useful in semi-cooperative and negotiation-heavy games, but the principle is broader. Private goals create interpretation. They force players to ask not only whether an action is good, but why another player seems to think it is good. Once motivations are partly hidden, behavior itself becomes information.
There is a cost, of course. If secret objectives are too powerful, the shared game can become irrelevant. If they are too opaque, other players may feel that outcomes are determined by conditions they could never have anticipated. The objective does not need to be known, but the existence and possible importance of secret objectives usually should be. Hidden information works best when players understand the shape of what they do not know.
Public objectives change information even when everyone can see them
Information design is not only about secrecy. Public objectives can be just as influential because they tell everyone what is worth paying attention to.
In Sagrada, shared scoring conditions create common points of reference. In Dead of Winter, the group must respond to a shared crisis while individual motivations may complicate the response. Ticket to Ride combines private destination tickets with a board whose geography and claimed routes are visible to everyone. In each case, public and private information interact.
A public objective does something important to the table: it creates common knowledge. It is not merely that I know the objective. I know that you know it, and you know that I know you know it. That allows us to anticipate one another. A desirable space becomes contested before anyone takes it. A scoring opportunity can influence several players at once. A public goal can therefore create competition and interaction without directly forcing players to attack one another.
The design choice is not simply between public and secret goals. The interesting possibilities often come from combining them. Public information establishes a shared landscape of incentives, while private information gives players different reasons for moving through it.
Players do not need to know who is winning
One of the most common questions during a game is deceptively simple: who is winning right now? I do not think a good game always needs to provide a precise answer.
In Ticket to Ride, I cannot see the destination tickets held by other players. In 7 Wonders, I am unlikely to stop after every turn and calculate everyone’s exact final score. During a first play, I may finish with seventy points without having any idea whether seventy represents an excellent result or a disastrous one. None of this is necessarily a problem.
What I do need is the ability to understand my own position. I should be able to tell whether the routes I need are being connected, whether my science engine is developing, whether my military strategy is working, or whether the plan I have been pursuing is beginning to fail. The game does not have to tell me exactly where I rank, but it should give me enough information to evaluate the consequences of my decisions.
This distinction is important. Uncertainty about who will eventually win can create tension. Uncertainty about what is happening at all creates confusion. A hidden score is not automatically a failure of feedback if the player can still read the systems that produce that score.
Hidden information still needs to be legible
Suppose another player reveals a secret objective at the end of the game and gains thirty points. That can be completely fair even if I never knew which objective they had. What matters is whether I knew that secret objectives existed, understood that they could matter significantly, and had some opportunity to interpret the player’s behavior in that context.
The same applies to Catan development cards. I may not know whether a face-down card is a Knight, a Road Building card or a Victory Point, but I know the range of possibilities. In Ticket to Ride, I do not know an opponent’s destinations, but I know they are trying to connect cities and can watch the routes they claim. The information is incomplete, yet the system remains readable.
There is a substantial difference between concealing an answer and concealing the existence of the question. Good hidden information usually preserves the player’s ability to reason about possibilities. I may be wrong about what you are doing, but I should have some basis for forming the hypothesis.
This is also what makes surprise feel different from arbitrariness. A surprising outcome can emerge from information that was incomplete but interpretable. An arbitrary outcome often feels as though the game withheld the tools needed to understand what was possible in the first place.
Learning to read information is part of mastery
A player’s relationship with information changes with experience. During a first game, a board may contain dozens of visible facts that mean almost nothing. After ten plays, the same arrangement can immediately communicate danger, opportunity and intent.
This is an important part of mastery that is easy to overlook. Experienced players do not only know more rules or calculate more accurately. They become better at assigning meaning to information. They recognize which resources are scarce, which positions are threatening, which cards are likely to matter, and which apparent advantages are less important than they look.
That means a game can contain open information without being immediately transparent. Chess is the obvious example: every piece is visible, yet a novice and a grandmaster do not meaningfully see the same position. The information is identical; their ability to interpret it is not.
The same process occurs in less abstract games. A new player may believe they are comfortably ahead because they have accumulated visible points, while an experienced player recognizes that an opponent’s engine is about to convert into a much larger score. Learning the game means learning what to look at, how much weight to give it, and what can safely be ignored.
This gives designers another useful question. Beyond deciding what information to reveal, we can ask whether the game teaches players how to read that information. Feedback, repeated patterns, visible consequences and consistent iconography all help players build a mental model of the system. A game becomes deeper when experience improves interpretation, but it becomes frustrating when essential information remains obscure for reasons unrelated to the intended challenge.
Design the flow of information, not just the rules
Every game creates an information economy whether the designer plans one explicitly or not. Rules determine what can happen, but information determines what players can reasonably believe might happen. Objectives tell players what matters, but visibility determines whether they can evaluate their progress. Hidden roles, secret cards and concealed scores are obvious information mechanisms, but so are public tracks, open discard piles, component placement, player aids and the simple decision to show or hide a number.
For that reason, I think information deserves to be treated as a design material in its own right. When examining a system, it is worth asking who knows each piece of information, when they learn it, whether other players know that they know it, what can be inferred without certainty, and what decisions become possible because of that structure.
Too much information can turn uncertainty into calculation. Too little can turn decision-making into guessing. The interesting space lies between those extremes, where players know enough to form plans but not enough to guarantee them; where they can read one another without seeing everything; and where experience improves their ability to understand what the game is telling them.
Designers are not only deciding what players are allowed to do. They are deciding what players are allowed to know while they decide it.