Board games have a long, proud tradition of disrupting even the most civil gatherings of friends and family. Usually this is due to one player’s hyper-competitive spirit or sneaky, cheating bastardry. However, the new breed of modern board games has embraced the dark side, requiring you to bluff, deceive, and betray your nearest and dearest on your way to victory. No multiplayer videogame can give you the same feeling of joy of sitting round a table with people, talking, having fun, and looking them in the eyes and lying in the name of entertainment. Hell, you may even learn something about each other while you’re playing.
Here are my top three board games guaranteed to have you lying to your friends and family in no time at all.
Sheriff of Nottingham:
In Sheriff of Nottingham players are merchants, trying to turn a profit by smuggling illegal goods into medieval Nottingham. Each turn one player acts as the Sheriff, desperately trying to keep Nottingham free of contraband. The merchants declare what they are bringing to market, and the Sheriff sorts the lies from the truth – who’s really bringing five wheels of cheese to town and who’s trying to smuggle enough illegal crossbows to start a war? If the sheriff opens the merchant’s packet to find something illegal he receives a juicy fine; if everything’s above board, the sheriff must compensate the merchant instead.
This simple premise builds into a twisting, constantly-shifting web of trickery and deceit, bluff and double-bluff and a whole banana republic’s worth of bribery and corruption.
SoN is full of tricky decisions: do you become a smuggler and try to bluff or bribe your way through, or play honestly and risk losing because you’ve got no high-value goods to sell at the end? As sheriff you could go for the kill and open a merchant’s goods – but what if the bribe they offered you was a bluff and they land you with a hefty payout?
Everything boils down to one simple question – can you look your friends in the eye and lie? The game insists that you look your opponent in the eye when you declare your goods, testing your acting skills but also ensuring that every lie feels personal, hitting home like a knife in the back.
SoN is a ton of fun, founded entirely on friends pushing their luck and screwing each other over. When I convinced my friend that my bag full of illegal spices was a bunch of perfectly-legal chickens and he let me through without checking, I found it impossible not to cackle like a tickled witch and dance around the room declaring myself the master of lies.
The Resistance:
The players are the Resistance, brave revolutionaries battling to bring down an evil, tyrannical government. The catch? Some are spies, and will do everything they can to bring the Resistance down from the inside.
Each round a vote is put to the players on who will go on the mission. Those chosen then secretly decide whether they aid the mission’s success or allow it to fail – these responses are collected, randomised, and revealed. It only takes one failure to appear to scupper the entire mission, making every vote matter.
Everything in The Resistance is designed to foster player conflict. The spies are always outnumbered, but know who the other spies are so they can work together. The true revolutionaries, on the other hand, are uncertain of the alliegance of the other players and can’t trust anyone. If the players disagree and are unable to agree on a team, the next player chooses again – but fail to agree five times in a row and the whole revolution grinds to a halt and the government agents win.
It is the debating, arguing, pleading, and downright lying that accompanies each round of The Resistance that makes the game special. My gaming group doesn’t call this game the “argument in a box” for nothing. I forced a casual acquaintance to go for a walk to calm down after making him the patsy for my spying shenanigans – turning everyone against him and having every other player vote for my involvement in the final, critical mission. Which I failed, gleefully revealing myself as a spy and high-fiving my fellow infiltrator in front of everyone’s horrified faces.
Bliss.
Dead of Winter:
Think you’ve got the smarts to lead a team of survivors through both an arctic winter and a zombie apocalypse? Dead of Winter lets you test yourself; but as countless films, shows, and books have taught us, it is your fellow man who you have to look for at the end of the world.
Dead of Winter forces players to work together while ensuring that they can never entirely trust one another. In addition to a critical communal goal, such as finding a cure or just surviving until spring, they each have a secret objective they must complete. Like all good post-apocalypses, there are never enough resources to go ’round. Do you share the fuel you scavenged from the gas station to heat the camp, or keep it for your own secret escape plan and hope someone else chips in? Players immediately distrust each other, torn between playing for the team and looking out for number one.
The real kicker is the possibility that one of your fellow players is the betrayer, who only wins if all the other players lose. You won’t always have a betrayer when you play, but the possibility is always there. Whenever someone messes up – and they will, the game is devilishly hard – you have to work out if they are merely incompetent or failing on purpose. Take revenge on the betrayer and you’ll probably win; doing so to someone who made an honest mistake will plunge the camp into anarchy and help the real betrayer tear your plans apart.
Continuing my pattern of shocking behaviour, I once high-fived two of my oldest friends in the last turn of DoW when there was no way the game could beat us, then used the very last roll of the dice to summon a bunch of zombies, killing them. I had lied so well they were speechless for minutes afterwards. I don’t think they’ll ever trust me again – and it was totally worth it.
