Tag: Hidden Roles

Hidden Objective games are games in which a player’s role is kept secret from other players.

Bristol 1350

| T3d-1978
Bristol 1350

Bristol 1350

The dreaded Black Death has descended upon the town of Bristol. You are racing down the streets in one of the three available apple carts, desperate to escape into the safety of the countryside. If your cart is the first to leave the town and it is full of only healthy villagers when you leave, you and your fellow cart-mates successfully escape and win the game!

However, some villagers on your cart may already have the plague! They are hiding their early symptoms from you so that they can enjoy their last few days in peace. If you leave town with a plagued villager on your cart, you will catch the plague. You must do whatever is necessary to make sure that doesn’t happen!

On the surface Bristol 1350 is part co-operative teamwork, part racing strategy, and part social deduction. In reality, it’s a selfish scramble to get yourself out of town as quickly as possible without the plague, by any means necessary.

The game comes in a magnetic book box and includes a rubber playmat, 9 wood pawns, 3 miniature carts, 6 rat/apple dice, a linen bag, and 64 cards. The deluxe version adds 6 coins, 6 cards, and 3 metal carts. This standalone game is Volume 4 in the “Dark Cities Series” by Facade Games following Salem 1692, Tortuga 1667, and Deadwood 1876.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hidden Roles
  • Party Game
  • Player Elimination
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 9 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.54

BANG! The Dice Game

| T3d-1978
BANG! The Dice Game

BANG! The Dice Game

In the U.S. wild west, the eternal battle between the law and the outlaws keeps heating up. Suddenly, a rain of arrows darken the sky: It’s an Indian attack! Are you bold enough to keep up with the Indians? Do you have the courage to challenge your fate? Can you expose and defeat the ruthless gunmen around you?

BANG! The Dice Game keeps the core of the Bang! card game in place. At the start of the game, players each take a role card that secretly places them on a team: the Sheriff and deputies, outlaws, and renegades. The Sheriff and deputies need to kill the outlaws, the outlaws win by killing the Sheriff, and the renegades want to be the last players alive in the game.

Each player also receives a character card which grants him a special power in the game. The Sheriff reveals his role card and takes the first turn of the game. On a turn, a player can roll the five dice up to three times, using the results of the dice to shoot neighboring players, increase the range of his shots, heal his (or anyone else’s) life points, or put him in range of the Indians, which are represented by nine tokens in the center of the table. Each time a player rolls an arrow, he takes one of these tokens; when the final token is taken, each player loses one life point for each token he holds, then the tokens are returned to the center of the table.

If a player collects a trio of Gatling symbols on the dice, he fires one shot at everyone else and rids himself of Indian tokens. Who’ll get his shot off first? Play continues until one team meets its winning condition – and death won’t necessarily keep you from winning as long as your teammates pull through!

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hidden Roles
  • Party Game
  • Player Elimination
  • Push Your Luck
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 8 Players
  • ~15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.27

BANG! The Card Game

| T3d-1978
BANG! The Card Game

BANG! The Card Game

“The Outlaws hunt the Sheriff. The Sheriff hunts the Outlaws. The Renegade plots secretly, ready to take one side or the other. Bullets fly. Who among the gunmen is a Deputy, ready to sacrifice himself for the Sheriff? And who is a merciless Outlaw, willing to kill him? If you want to find out, just draw (your cards)!” (From back of box)

The card game BANG! recreates an old-fashioned spaghetti western shoot-out, with each player randomly receiving a Character card to determine special abilities, and a secret Role card to determine their goal.

Four different Roles are available, each with a unique victory condition:

  • Sheriff – Kill all Outlaws and the Renegade
  • Deputy – Protect the Sheriff and kill any Outlaws
  • Outlaw – Kill the Sheriff
  • Renegade – Be the last person standing

A player’s Role is kept secret, except for the Sheriff. Character cards are placed face up on table, and also track strength (hand limit) in addition to special ability.

There are 22 different types of cards in the draw deck. Most common are the BANG! cards, which let you shoot at another player, assuming the target is within “range” of your current gun. The target player can play a “MISSED!” card to dodge the shot. Other cards can provide temporary boosts while in play (for example, different guns to improve your firing range) and special one-time effects to help you or hinder your opponents (such as Beer to restore health, or Barrels to hide behind during a shootout). A horse is useful for keeping your distance from unruly neighbors, while the Winchester can hit a target at range 5. The Gatling is a deadly exception where range doesn’t matter: it can only be used once, but targets all other players at the table!

Information on the cards is displayed using language-independent symbols, and 7 summary/reference cards are included.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Hand Management
  • Hidden Roles
  • Player Elimination
  • Take That
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 4 – 7 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.63

Avalon

| T3d-1978
Avalon

Avalon

The Resistance: Avalon pits the forces of Good and Evil in a battle to control the future of civilization. Arthur represents the future of Britain, a promise of prosperity and honor, yet hidden among his brave warriors are Mordred’s unscrupulous minions. These forces of evil are few in number but have knowledge of each other and remain hidden from all but one of Arthur’s servants. Merlin alone knows the agents of evil, but he must speak of this only in riddles. If his true identity is discovered, all will be lost.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Negotiation
  • Party Game
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 5 – 10 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.76

Agatha Christie’s Death on the Cards

| T3d-1978
Agatha Christie's Death on the Cards

Agatha Christie's Death on the Cards

In Agatha Christie: Death on the Cards, which consists of a deck of eighty cards, players work co-operatively to solve a murder, using their detective skills to unmask the culprit and prevent their escape. The twist is that one of the players is the murderer and must work against the group to keep themselves hidden. Players also have dark secrets from their past they want to keep hidden from the other players. Who can you trust?

Game Mechanics:

  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.25

Unfathomable

| T3d-1978
Unfathomable

Unfathomable

The year is 1913. The steamship SS Atlantica is two days out from port on its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Its unsuspecting passengers fully anticipated a calm journey to Boston, Massachusetts, with nothing out of the ordinary to look forward to. However, strange nightmares plague the minds of the people aboard the ship every night; rumors circulate of dark shapes following closely behind the ship just beneath the waves; and tensions rise when a body is discovered in the ship’s chapel, signs of a strange ritual littered around the corpse.

Lurking within the depths of the Atlantic Ocean are a swarm of vicious, unspeakable horrors: the Deep Ones, led by Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. For reasons unknown, they have set their sights on the Atlantica, and their minions, taking the form of human-Deep One hybrids, have infiltrated the steamship to help sink it from within. Each game of Unfathomable has one or more players assuming the role of one of these hybrids, and how well they can secretly sabotage the efforts of the other players might mean the difference between a successful voyage and a sunken ship.

If you’re a human, you need to fend off Deep Ones, prevent the Atlantica from taking too much damage, and carefully manage the ship’s four crucial resources if you want any hope of making it to Boston, all while trying to figure out which of your fellow players are friends and which are foes. Everyone shares the same resource pool, but humans will try to preserve them while traitors will strive to subtly deplete them. Being able to tell when someone is purposefully draining the group’s resources is harder than you think, especially when you take crises into account!

At the end of each player’s turn, that player must draw a mythos card. Each of these cards represents a crisis that the whole group must try to resolve together. Some of these crises, such as “Food Rationing”, call for a choice that could potentially put the ship’s passengers or resources at risk, while others, such as “Hull Leak”, call for a skill test in which failure could have disastrous consequences.

During a skill test, each player contributes skill cards from their hand to a face-down pile shared by the group. Once everyone has contributed (or chosen not to), the cards are shuffled, then revealed. If enough of the correct skills were contributed, then the group passes the test! But if the wrong skills were contributed, they can actually hinder the results, leading to failure. Thus, skill tests are dangerous opportunities for traitors to sabotage the humans’ efforts, so you have to stay on your toes at all times.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Movement
  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Hand Management
  • Hidden Roles
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 6 Players
  • 120 – 240 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.94

The Thing: The Boardgame

| T3d-1978
The Thing: The Boardgame

The Thing: The Boardgame

The Thing is a game that mixes different mechanisms to create an experience that is as faithful as possible to that of the original film. It is a “hidden role” game, in which one player is initially the Thing and the others players are humans. The purpose of the Thing is to infect others, to prevent the survivors from escaping from the base (which can happen three different ways), or to try to escape with them by behaving as a human.

In addition to these elements, players also have to manage Outpost 31. On the map are the same rooms as seen in the film, and each of these rooms allows players to perform a different action. Human players have to feed themselves and keep the boiler and the generator on to avoid being in the cold and dark. The Thing will try to sabotage these places to make life difficult for humans…or not, trying to camouflage itself among the humans and infect them when the perfect opportunity presents itself.

The goal of the game designers was to bring the same personal emotions and paranoia that the protagonists of the film experienced to the gaming table.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Hidden Roles

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 8 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.89

The Shadow Planet

| T3d-1978
The Shadow Planet

The Shadow Planet

In strange and remote regions of space, death may not be the worst end…

A group of astronauts on a rescue mission lands on a desolate planet to learn the fate of a long-lost scientific vessel. With little over a day to investigate what happened, they discover that the planet itself and the encountered survivors hide horrible secrets that might endanger humanity.

The Shadow Planet: The Board Game is a sci-fi game of alien horror, based on a beautifully illustrated, Italian graphic novel by Blasteroid Brothers and designed by Giacomo and Gianluca Santopietro, the authors responsible for Letters from Whitechapel. It perfectly blends the idea of hidden identities with a completely revolutionary approach to the deck-building genre, thus offering you a unique gaming experience and a chance to use a completely different strategy every time to play.

Draw your secret goal and use six different characters to achieve it. Deceive your rivals and control the flow of the game through cunning management of different decks. Move around various locations on the planet to gain powerful cards or use special abilities, but remember that they will also benefit your opponents, who can acquire the very same deck you’re trying to modify. Play over the table, look for allies, and identify the alien threat before it proves too powerful… unless you’re the creature trying to leave the planet! Save humanity… or save yourself.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Hidden Roles

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 5 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.86

Cult of the Deep

| T3d-1978
Cult of the Deep

Cult of the Deep

You are a cultist, trying to establish your faction’s rise to power. Fight over rituals and mythical monsters as you seek victory and control of the cult.

Roles

 

Each player is given a role that will remain hidden throughout the game, except the High Priest. This role will determine your win condition:

  • High Priest – Root out corruption in the cult. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and survive.
  • Cabalists – Seek to take control of the cult. Kill the High Priest.
  • Faithful – Protect the High Priest from threats to their power. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and the High Priest must survive.
  • Heretic – Burn the whole cult to the ground. Kill the entire cult, yourself included if necessary.

Extra abilities

 

Each player will also be given a:

  • Character card that determines their starting health, special ability, and a power symbol that provides an additional way to gain life from the dice.
  • Secret sigil card, which gives each cultist a once per game power, will also be given to each player.

Mechanics

 

A player will take a turn by first rolling their dice up to 3 times. They then decide where to commit their dice: to rituals to gain altar effects to temporarily empower themselves, finish a ritual in order to gain its powerful effects permanently, stab other cultists, gain life, or give life to other cultists.

If a player is killed, they are not eliminated. Instead, they become a wraith. They will roll dice on their turn still, just less. They cannot commit dice like normal but instead haunt the dice of enemies and allies by giving, replacing, or discarding dice.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Bribery
  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hidden Roles
  • Push Your Luck
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 4 – 8 Players
  • 45 – 75 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.67

Blood on the Clocktower

| T3d-1978
Blood on the Clocktower

Blood on the Clocktower

In the quiet village of Ravenswood Bluff, ‌a demon walks amongst you…

During a hellish thunderstorm, on the stroke of midnight, there echoes a bone-chilling scream. The townsfolk rush to investigate and find the town storyteller murdered, their body impaled on the hands of the clocktower, blood dripping onto the cobblestones below. A Demon is on the loose, murdering by night and disguised in human form by day. Some have scraps of information. Others have abilities that fight the evil or protect the innocent. But the Demon and its evil minions are spreading lies to confuse and breed suspicion. Will the good townsfolk put the puzzle together in time to execute the true demon and save themselves? Or will evil overrun this once peaceful village?

Blood on the Clocktower is a bluffing game enjoyed by 5 to 20 players on opposing teams of Good and Evil, overseen by a Storyteller player who conducts the action and makes crucial decisions. The goal of the game is to successfully deduce and execute the demons before they outnumber the townfolk.

During a ‘day’ phase players socialize openly and whisper privately to trade knowledge or spread lies, culminating in a player’s execution if a majority suspects them of being Evil. Of a ‘night’ time, players close their eyes and are woken one at a time by the Storyteller to gather information, spread mischief, or kill.

The Storyteller uses the game’s intricate playing pieces to guide each game, leaving others free to play without a table or board. Players stay in the thick of the action to the very end even if their characters are killed, haunting Ravenswood Bluff as ghosts trying to win from beyond the grave.

If you arrive late to a game, you can enter after it’s started as a powerful Traveller character with unusual talents and questionable allegiances. Each character comes with their own special ability and no two players in a game are ever the same character.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Negotiation
  • Party Game
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 6 – 20 Players
  • 30 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.04