In late-2022, I hosted my own version of The Mole over a series of months with some friends and cold applicants, giving away $1000 in prize money. I learned a lot about game design from this experience and in this post I’ll share most of these insights. But first, I will answer the likely most pressing question about this project: why on Earth did I do it?!?

I became enamoured with reality competition shows as they were rising to popularity in the year 2000, but The Mole was the first one that truly captured my imagination. Its basic premise is that a group works together to complete missions in order to add money to a group pot, all while a saboteur secretly undermines the group’s efforts.

Describing the show in every detail is beyond the scope of this post, nor would it even do justice to why the show was so good. With any creative project, as long as you get the tone right, nothing else matters – and The Mole nailed its tone. The Mole had the intrigue of a murder mystery, the flair of a confident action movie, and the exciting novelty that all early-2000s reality competition shows had because they were so unprecedented at the time.

(Also, I’m pretty sure its final mission anticipated the escape room craze by 15 years? You can be the judge: https://youtu.be/t_BryHVNUp0?list=PL1E796BA90C005287&t=1076)

The show inspired me so much that I hosted a mock version of it during recess in Grade 4. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you much about it, except that (a) it fizzled out within a week after I ran out of ideas and (b) hosting a game show really struck a chord with me as something I wanted to do more of, in some form, someday.

My interest in reality competition shows fluctuated over the years, but I always had it in the back of my mind that one of the first things I would do if I ever became eccentrically rich would be to host as grand-scale of a Mole game as I could.

It took 22 years, but in November of 2022, my savings account had ballooned to an exorbitant five-figure balance, and I decided that my first act as a member of society’s elite was to finally live out my childhood dream.

The Setup

Late 2022 was the perfect time to run this because Netflix had just aired a Mole reboot, exposing a new generation of people to my favorite childhood show.

I built the cast around a handful of my funnier, more-dramatic friends that were watching the Netflix show. Once they agreed, I put out open applications in various Discord servers I was in, alongside this enigmatic sizzle trailer I threw together in a few hours using iMovie:

From the handful of recruits that showed interest but couldn’t commit to playing a full season, I got them to join my “production” team that would help run the challenges and keep track of the goings-on throughout the game.

Designing The Mole

The Mole’s Motivations

Unlike the televised show, in which the Mole receives a fixed stipend from the producers, most fan adaptations of The Mole use a “Mole pot”, in which the saboteur is guaranteed to receive any money that they prevent the rest of the cast from winning.

This isn’t a good system. If you’re producing a Mole game, you don’t want the Mole to blatantly sabotage every challenge because the cast will quickly catch on to the saboteur’s identity and any intrigue will be drained from the season. The Mole him- or herself, however, doesn’t inherently share this goal – and if they have their own pot to build, they’re actively incentivized to work against this goal. The Mole should be a vehicle of production’s wishes, and any misalignment of incentives should be smoothed out.

Challenges

Selecting challenges and scheduling which rounds they’ll show up are production’s main way of manipulating the drama and storylines that will emerge between the cast members.

• If you want to foster a temporary sense of camaraderie, schedule an easier competition that’s difficult for any individual to sabotage.
• If you want the players to get to know each other better (i.e., within the first few rounds of the game), schedule a challenge that requires people to learn things about each other and/or make social reads about each other.
• If you want to stoke paranoia between players, schedule a game in which non-Mole players also have an incentive to lie and sabotage (i.e., in order to receive an Exemption – The Mole’s version of immunity.)

I wanted to set a tone from the start of paranoia and interpersonal drama so I made the first challenge one in which players met me in a private room and occasionally had an incentive to lie when they reported back to the group. In the private room with me, they would randomly pick a sub-objective that, if accomplished, would help the group add money to the pot. I balanced the paranoid, angry tone I was setting with sporadic funny objectives (sadly, the YouTube livestream footage is lost forever, but I had amazing footage of one of the contestants who had to go back to the group and sing “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood from start to finish – shouting over the rest of the group’s attempts to strategize.)

Then, for the second challenge of the night, I set up a simple game in which people created a “Two Truths and a Lie” about themselves, in which money would be added to the group pot each time the lie was guessed successfully. This gave players a chance to scrutinize each other more closely, thus fast-tracking social reads, relationships, and suspicions.

Final Thoughts

I had planned on writing a longer post when I started today, but I forgot how much footage of the season was lost. So I’ll wrap this up with some final thoughts to aspiring Mole hosts.

More than any other reality competition format, The Mole is a show that benefits from the tone that production sets with each decision it makes. The original host of the broadcasted show, Anderson Cooper, was fondly remembered for his moments of levity with the cast – but the reason these moments were so iconic was because he was serious the rest of the time. The host’s demeanour, the structure of the challenges, and every other accoutrement of the show’s presentation should all communicate the same message: this game is important, the stakes are high, and there is a grand mystery to be solved. These kinds of touches are what maintain the “magic circle” that allows players to become fully immersed in the game “world” you create for them (in this case, a few hours, twice per week, for a few months.)

Coming Soon

• Hosting The Devil’s Plan
• Hosting The Anonymous
• Hosting Two Rooms and a Boom
• Hosting (“Storytelling”) Blood on the Clocktower
• How to Design Survivor Twists That Don’t Suck
• and more!