/pic9225195.png)
SituationalHoneypot came home in the same Gen Con haul as everything else this year, another Flatout Games box picked up on the strength of the same instinct that got me Forage. I should say upfront, before anything else, that what follows comes from a solo play, rather than an actual table full of people. I didn't play this one with anyone. I played it against myself, or more accurately against several versions of myself standing in for opponents who don't exist, and I think that's worth naming clearly because it shapes everything I have to say about it.
The game casts you as a spy bear, which is exactly as goofy as it sounds and exactly as charming. You draw a hand of cards, look them over, and stack them face down before handing that stack off to be someone else's problem. On your turn you flip the top pair of a cache someone handed you and decide whether to keep it or send it back down for the next pair, knowing the final pair in any stack can't be refused once you get there. There's honey involved, and bees that punish whoever's holding them at the end, and a whole vocabulary of good intel and bad intel that only means anything once you've learned to read it. The real engine of the game, the thing everyone who's played it with real people seems to talk about, is the reading. You're supposed to be gauging a face across the table, catching a flicker of hesitation, deciding whether the person who built this stack is bluffing about how bad it is or telling the truth by accident.
None of that happened for me, because there wasn't anyone to read. What I had instead was the strange experience of trying to simulate a mind I was also the author of, thanks Nick Bostrom. I'd build a stack meant to fool an opponent, then immediately have to become that opponent and decide whether I'd been fooled, knowing full well what I'd just done because I was the one who did it. It's a bit like trying to surprise yourself with a joke you already know the punchline to. You can approximate the shape of being deceived, you can even feel a flicker of real uncertainty if you look away from your own reasoning long enough, but you can't actually not know what you know. The game asks you to hold two incompatible positions in your head at once, the deceiver and the deceived, and I found that harder than any of the actual card math.
What struck me most, sitting with it alone, is how much of what we call "reading someone" quietly assumes there's an actual other person there to misjudge. Take that person away and you're left holding a mirror instead of a face, and a mirror doesn't lie to you so much as it just shows you back to yourself a little late. I don't think that makes the solo mode pointless. If anything it made the seams of the design more visible to me than a real game night probably would have, because I could see exactly where the mechanics were built to carry a social weight I wasn't actually supplying. The push-your-luck decisions still worked. The math around the honeycomb and the bees still worked. It was only the bluffing, the actual heart of the thing, that turned into something closer to solitaire dressed up in a trench coat.
I'd like to play this one for real eventually, with people who can actually be surprised by me, or disappointed in me, or smug about having read me correctly. Most likely this will happen next weekend or at BGG in November. Until then it sits on the shelf as a reminder that some games need a second person the way a conversation does, and that practicing a bluff alone in a room is really just another way of thinking out loud.
