August has been a remarkable month. I’ve had the good fortune to play quite a few board games, including an epic 27-out-of-35 consecutive hour bender. Our board game weekend included two games each of Dead of Winter and Dark Moon among other titles. While Eldritch Horror stole the show, I’ve been contemplating my relationship with hidden traitor games over the last couple weeks.
I’ve been a fan of this style of game since Hobby Box Burns first introduced us to the concept with Battlestar Galactica years ago. The idea is novel – the group is working together to accomplish something, but someone on the team is trying to ruin everything. Having played a few of these style games now, I’m still trying to decide if I like the mechanic.
I am generally a fan of treachery in games. We played Western Legends during the gaming weekend, which has separate tracks for lawmen and desperados. Players are free to jump to either side of the law at will, like when I abandoned my place on the Marshall track for the opportunity to rob Burns of his hard-earned gold. I became wanted and was arrested before my next turn, but I was able to bank a sweet haul of gold and achieve one of my secret objectives.
I like games that let you be as bad as you want. There’s an element of Ultima Online that lives on in me today. That game let you do whatever you wanted – you could go kill big demons and serpents or you could kill or steal from other players. Griefing other players isn’t my bag – except for the Rogue Hippo but that’s a rivalry for another day – but I do appreciate being able to capitalize on any weakness that I see. One of the last times we played Scythe, one of my opponents left a big pile or resources unguarded and I swooped in and grabbed them. It was crippling for him, and it meant I no longer had to spend time producing resources.
Dead of Winter
In this game, each player draws four survivors from a deck and chooses which two to serve as their initial avatars. You pick a story-driven scenario that outlines basic starting parameters and victory conditions. There are six locations to visit outside your colony. Each turn players are required to gather food to feed the total number of survivors, and another resource that will prevent something bad from happening. The second resource is a blind donation (crisis check) – everyone plays cards into the pool face down. At the end of the turn, the first player will shuffle the cards and reveal them to see if the players made the check.
This game will have at max one traitor (called a betrayer in this game) and it’s possible that no one will be working against the team. Each player, betrayer or not, will have a secret objective card. It’s possible for an individual player to lose, even if the team wins. It’s also possible that the traitor will lose even if the rest of the players lose.
I found myself in this situation in our first game. For me to win, I needed the other players to lose and I had to have at least two more followers (characters) than the player with the next most. To get followers, you need to find them at one of the six locations outside the settlement. On your turn you will roll a pool of six-sided dice, and you can assign dice to characters based on your roll and their skill.
Whenever you leave the settlement, there is a chance the character you are moving will be killed. You roll a d12, and if a tooth comes up your avatar is toast. Only one of my characters was good at searching and he died the moment he stepped out of the colony. My other dude needed a five or six in order to search. I had a hard time rolling that high and with his expertise in fighting it would be suspicious if he wasn’t whacking zombies. The players were eventually overrun, but I failed to claim the victory. The lone highlight was convincing the other players another player was the betrayer and getting him exiled.
I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this session. I can’t recall if I had my secret objective card before I chose my characters. I think I chose my two to balance my abilities before I knew I was the betrayer. If possible, I should have chosen two characters who were good at searching, regardless of their combat skills. Even if I had the ideal skill set – would that have made being the betrayer fun? I would have been tethered to a location, sifting through item cards hoping for an ideal draw. Once I had the followers I needed I could start sandbagging the crisis checks. My friends are naturally suspicious of me, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t figure it out.
In Battlestar, you know that at least two people are going to be Cylons. You don’t necessarily know when the Cylons are active – at the midpoint, more loyalty cards are dealt and you know there are two Cylons and a sympathizer. Technically, it’s most effective for Cylons to reveal immediately and start hounding the humans as early as possible, but the real joy of the game is lying to your friends and seeing how long you can convince them you empathize with their squishy bits.
Dark Moon
This title is more similar to Battlestar – there will definitely be infected players and they will be there from the beginning. There are three main systems to your base – shields, support systems and life support. If any of the three takes too much damage, the humans are eradicated and the infected players win.
Dark Moon differs from the other games because it is all done with dice. You have a pool and you decide whether or not to contribute them to various checks on each player’s turn. One player is the captain, and they get to choose what the overarching challenges are before the final scenario. Each player will draw a task card after completing the action on their turn. If the humans contribute enough positive dice to overcome the task, they move one step closer to completing the overarching scenario.
In our two games, the infected won the first game. One of the infected players had a chance to win early on – and passed on it. We all clearly thought he was a human and trusted him implicitly. When the infected players won, with one non-infected human in quarantine, we were shocked to learn the captain had been working against us.
I was infected for our second playthrough. I was waiting for an impactful moment to reveal my intentions to crush the uninfected but it never really came up. The humans were just cruising. They kept their systems well-maintained. Out of seven players, three of us were infected and apparently we all slow-played it too much. With roughly two turns before human victory, I finally had to reveal that I was infected by contributing negative dice to a check. My turn was up next and there was no way for the humans to lock me up. Fortunately, the player after me followed suit and we were able to wreak havoc and make a game of it over the last few turns.
As I’ve reflected on the game, I’ve been turning it over and over in my head wondering how to make being an infected player more fun. With Battlestar, there are more things you can do and more subtle ways to work against the humans. When your only resource is one of four dice and your actions are made in public, it hampers your ability to pull one over on your friends.
I think it’s important to have a range of options as a hidden traitor. Battlestar gives you a decent toolbox – both Dead of Winter and Dark Moon have fewer options.
One of Stonemaier Games’ design tenets is that interesting choices are more important than randomness in games – I wonder what it would look like if they tried their hand at this genre? Or if there was a video game that could incorporate this mechanic. We could have had some very interesting sessions of Ghost Recon Wildlands if we had secret objectives we were trying to accomplish. If there was a goal to blow up your team with grenades while they were in menus, I would have crushed it.
Based on these three games, I don’t think the hidden traitor genre is for me. I like competitive games where you know who your enemies are – especially if there is potential to make and break alliances. I like cooperative games where you are all working together towards something. For me, the hidden traitor mechanic takes away from these things – you don’t have control over who your allies are and you’re not always a part of the team.
These are the only three games I’ve played with a hidden traitor mechanic – are there better ones out there? I’d love to hear your thoughts on twitter or over email!
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Thank you so much for reading my column this month. I’ll keep dreaming up ways to betray my friends in board and video games. Until next time, stay inside kids!