The following is a list of all board game mechanics I know in this category, and that aren’t too niche. Card game mechanics are also included. I’m posting this mainly for my own reference.

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Deduction: Players are trying to determine the identity of hidden information based on clues.

Hidden Movement: Movement occurs that is not visible to all players. Scotland Yard is a classic game implementing this mechanism. A key challenge for designers is determining how to make the movement rules simple enough that the players moving hidden units do not make mistakes, or that paths are traceable when the game concludes.

Hidden Roles: In games with hidden roles, one or more players are assigned differing roles that are not publicly revealed.

Hidden Victory Points: The number of Victory Points held by each player is private information.

Memory: Hidden, trackable information whose tracking gives players an advantage.

Questions and Answers: Players ask and answer questions in a manner constrained by rules. This mechanism is mostly found in deduction games. It generally does not apply to trivia games, where it is not the players that come up with the questions.

Roles With Asymmetric Information: One or more players are secretly assigned roles at the start of the game which have different win conditions, and receive different starting information about the game state.

This is a typically a subset of Hidden Roles, except that all players have incomplete information. In Werewolf all werewolves know the full game state. In contrast, in Spyfall most players know the location but not who the spy is, while the spy has the opposite information.

Examples of this mechanism include Insider and Spyfall.

Secret Unit Deployment: In Secret Unit Deployment games, some (or all) pieces enter the board in secret, and only the player controlling certain playing pieces has perfect information about the nature (or even the whereabouts) of those pieces. Other players will not know where those pieces are located on the board, or they may know where pieces are, but not know the details (such as strength or type) of these pieces. This mechanic is often used in wargames to simulate “fog of war”.