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[AdamH]

I like the hidden loyalty mechanic in games. Resistance is one of my favorite games, but is falling out of favor with my IRL gaming group for a few reasons (it's been played SO MUCH, being the main one, but also the number of players required can be a barrier to entry). That same group plays a TONNE of Battlestar Galactica, but that game takes SO LONG!

I'd really like to find some other games that might be played with my IRL group. I'll list the games that include hidden loyalty mechanics that I've played and reasons why I (or my group) liked or disliked them and maybe you all can give me some recommendations?

Resistance: 15 minutes to play, so it's nice and short. Great for playing multiple games in one session, which can add to the metagame in some cases. There are easy variants to add that provide variety of play, and the game is very light on mechanics. Essentially the whole game is about the hidden loyalties. I love this game.

Bad things: other people in my group seem to like what they call a "fuller gaming experience," which probably means there are some mechanics to hide behind. OK I guess I don't mind this, but I would prefer for the hidden loyalties to be as large a part of the game as possible. Unfortunately, the game just doesn't work at all with four or less, and can seem a little less satisfying with only five players. 3-5 player games seem to work best with my IRL group. It's been played so much that certain people in my group will refuse to play it anymore, which has effectively led to it being played anymore

Battlestar Galactica: Man, I love that show, and I love Baltar, and I usually love the first 20 or so minutes of the game, even though I don't even understand how half of the mechanics work (Baltar never needs to get in a Viper, does he?). But oh mansies, does this game take way too long! If Battlestar took an hour to play, tops, and maybe wasn't so complicated, I would probably be really into it.

Don't ask me which expansions I'm playing with: probably all of them; my group would have it no other way. They just got "Daybreak" which apparently makes the game take EVEN LONGER! No thank you.

Bang! This game seems to take way too long for what it delivers. I feel like it should never take longer than 30 minutes, but I've never played a game that finished in an hour or less. There's also player elimination which sucks a lot. Also, there seem to only be rare circumstances where keeping your identity a secret is beneficial, which takes focus off of the hidden loyalty aspect of the game.

Panic Station: This game has seen a couple of plays with our group. It wasn't too popular, and I think the reason why is because usually the endgame drags on for quite a bit. There are a few situations very close to a stalemate that seem pretty common (infected people hoarding gas, humans separated from where they need to go by a ton of bugs, just waiting to draw ammo cards to deal with them). Also player elimination here is a minus.

------------------------

Games I've looked at:

Saboteur: I played a half of a game of this once, and none of us really knew the rules. Is this game good?

Room 25: Read a pdf of the rules, read some very mixed reviews, saw a PBF version of the game. Is this game good?

[liopoil]

well, there's mafia...

I've played Shadows over Camelot a couple times and liked it. Both times the traitor won though

[jsh357]

Saboteur is a lot of fun, but it definitely feels more like a party game than other Mafia type games.  I played a 7 player game once IRL and we all had a blast.  (With the expansion, which balances the game out a lot and adds more roles)  I don't think it's especially deep.

[Watno]

Did you actually get Panic Station to work? I played it once, and everyone agreed the game is broken. How do you notice the game is actually over?.

Anyway, I think the niche of a hidden-loyality game where you find out loyalities not mainly by discussing, but by the moves people do, but doesn't take 4 hours to play has really high potential

[AdamH]

First game of Panic Station we played, the infected people had enough gas that it was impossible for the good guys to win. Nobody knew how many gas cards there were, so the one good guy who could still be effective kept on drawing cards and never getting gas. A similar situation can happen with ammunition. In either of these cases, I would assume it's up to the infected people to somehow declare victory, but there's not a mechanic for that (or even something that comes close), so the game just dragged on and on... It seemed that a game coming to a clean end was the exception, not the rule for Panic Station.

If I understand Mafia correctly, it's pretty much the same game as Resistance, right, so that means variants of it will never work with less than 5 people, right? If I'm mistaken, I'd love to know why.

I may have to look into Saboteur (and the expansion) a little more deeply...

I read a couple of quick reviews for Shadows over Camelot. I haven't found anything about how big of a role the hidden loyalties play in that game, is it a big deal, or is the game mostly about other things? Also, both reviews mentioned something similar to an issue BSG has, where you're only "sort of" allowed to talk about your cards in hand -- did you notice that was a problem?

[eHalcyon]

Hidden loyalties are pretty difficult to make meaningful with fewer than 5 players.  The only game that comes to my mind is Gentlemen Thieves.  I don't know much about it though.

[liopoil]

If I understand Mafia correctly, it's pretty much the same game as Resistance, right, so that means variants of it will never work with less than 5 people, right? If I'm mistaken, I'd love to know why.

It's different from resistance. the whole game, like resistance, revolves around finding the bad guys/good guys. But yeah, you need even more people than resistance. you need at least 5, (not that fun though), 6 can work, but more is better. And it does have player elimination.

[DG]

Shadow Hunters has a hidden allegiance theme. It's a relatively short game where you can wait until you find your enemies or just attack your fellow players from the start and hope for the best.

[Archetype]

Ultimate Werewolf: Inquistion seems like it'd be a good match for your group. It's like a cross between The Resistance and Mafia, but with actual game mechanics. Players are trying to hunt down werewolves in a Town and try to lynch them, but some of the players themselves are werewolves. Players choose an action each round (each matching a specific member of the Town) with no two players choosing the same action. Players then put out vote counters on town members and  whichever has the most is lynched. Everyone then 'goes to sleep' and the werewolves also secretly kill a townsmember.Everyone then opens their eyes and those two killed people and their matching actions are then removed from the game. Rinse and repeat until all Werewolves are eliminated or there are more werewolves than town members. It has a bit more luck than I would like, but I still enjoy it.

Come to think of it, this would work great as a PBF. Hm....

[Tables]

Resistance: 15 minutes to play, so it's nice and short.

O_O I haven't had a Resistance game take less than 30 minutes for a long time. Most go on for over an hour. How do your game go that quickly?

Anyway I'm a big fan of hidden traitor games. BSG and Resistance are two of my favourites. BSG has been houseruled to death by my gaming group, to the point where even I don't know the standard set of houserules any more. It's a good game but needs a little work.

Panic Station is a nice, quicker traitor game. I dislike that you can easily end up with 3-5 traitors, though, and you can very easily break the game by playing a strategy of 'infect me quickly plz' which if lots of people join in with, becomes silly. We thus play with a 'play for your current wincon' houserule, which is basically just honour system to actually make it work.

Shadows is a nice game, but somewhat counter-intuitive. Don't win most of the quests because that's bad. Win the game by letting the Saxons attack you. Traitor's best option is the be aggressive, and often good guys best option is not to accuse him. All those are kind of awkward honestly.

Resistance is my groups current go-to traitor game. We have some people who are very good at it, one of whom I've not found any way to read whatsoever.

[SirPeebles]

Samurai Sword is sort of like an improved version of Bang!. In particular, there is no player elimination, which I think is a nice thing.  There is a scoring system that scales which scales inversely with the size of your team, so the person playing as the Ronin (aka the Renegade in Bang!.) is no longer at such a steep disadvantage.

[Grujah]

Samurai Sword is sort of like an improved version of Bang!. In particular, there is no player elimination, which I think is a nice thing.  There is a scoring system that scales which scales inversely with the size of your team, so the person playing as the Ronin (aka the Renegade in Bang!.) is no longer at such a steep disadvantage.

There is a scoring system for Bang! as well.

[AJD]

I highly recommend Castle of the Devil. It's a card game with two teams; you start out not knowing who's on which team; your goal is, through swapping cards and challenging other players to duels and observing who cooperates with who, to figure out who's on which team and get the cards your team need to win. ("You fools! The Order—consisting of myself, Steve, and Cindy—controls the three mystical Goblets and demands the submission of the Brotherhood!") If one team holds the winning cards but hasn't realized it yet, the other team can steal the victory by figuring it out first.

[Ratsia]

I highly recommend Castle of the Devil.

I was about to suggest the same, but didn't manage to spell the original name "Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg" well enough for google to correct it, and the last time I played was well before the English version was released so did not know about the alternative name... No wonder they didn't go with the German name.

I don't personally like the game that much, both because I don't like the hidden team mechanic but also because the game is otherwise not perfectly balanced, but it indeed sounds like a good match for the OP. It's not bad, just not for me.

[Kuildeous]

I did pick up Room 25 on my own. I started a couple of PBF games to see how it goes. It's funny how the two games I'm modding are different. The first game had four players and happened to not have a traitor (a 20% chance of that happening). The second game has gotten pretty bloody. Tables seized upon a perfect opportunity and eliminated one of the players. Naturally, he revealed his traitor status, which gave him a benefit in the rest of the game.

What's interesting is that even the traitors don't even know who the other one is. So, in a 5- or 6-player game, you could accidentally eliminate a fellow traitor. As it turned out, Tables did eliminate a prisoner, so that second traitor is still out there.

I'll probably start another game of Room 25 when this one concludes.

The trick with Shadows is that you have to play suboptimally but not get called out on it. You need a pretty good poker face in some instances ("Man, I wish I had Fight 5 cards!"). For some reason, I'm not that big of a fan of playing Shadows with a traitor, but everyone else is, so I go along with it.

Red November does not have a hidden traitor mechanic, but it does have a "flee for your life" option. Toward the end of the game, a player can choose to use the aqualung and abandon ship. I'm not a fan of that because there are only two aqualungs in the game, and that causes weird hoarding issues. This could be fixed with hidden inventory, which I'm also not a fan of, since the game can be difficult enough as it is.

[AdamH]

Castle of the Devil and Room 25 look like games I want to try. They have a high enough chance of being awesome that it certainly justifies their low cost. I'm encouraged by the idea the Castle of the Devil might work well with 4 players since reviews seem to suggest that even numbers are better.

[Tables]

The trick with Shadows is that you have to play suboptimally but not get called out on it. You need a pretty good poker face in some instances ("Man, I wish I had Fight 5 cards!"). For some reason, I'm not that big of a fan of playing Shadows with a traitor, but everyone else is, so I go along with it.

Is this a good time to point out that making such a statement would be breaking the secrecy rules ?

[SirPeebles]

Samurai Sword is sort of like an improved version of Bang!. In particular, there is no player elimination, which I think is a nice thing.  There is a scoring system that scales which scales inversely with the size of your team, so the person playing as the Ronin (aka the Renegade in Bang!.) is no longer at such a steep disadvantage.

There is a scoring system for Bang! as well.

Not within a single game of Bang!.

[gman314]

I haven't tried it, but someone recently told me that the trick to making Saboteur work well without the expansion is to play with a group of cutthroat players, and then play to something like 10 or 15 gold. Then, everyone wants to play somewhat sub-optimally when they're a good dwarf, so that when they're a Saboteur people don't notice when they play somewhat less sub-optimally.

[Kuildeous]

The trick with Shadows is that you have to play suboptimally but not get called out on it. You need a pretty good poker face in some instances ("Man, I wish I had Fight 5 cards!"). For some reason, I'm not that big of a fan of playing Shadows with a traitor, but everyone else is, so I go along with it.

Is this a good time to point out that making such a statement would be breaking the secrecy rules ?

Well, true, not that exact statement, but the general point is that when you're staring at a full house of 4s and 5s, you have to pretend you got nothing. But then again, that allows you to get Lancelot's armor. Bad example.

A handful of Merlins or something.

Or, you know, shut up.

[liopoil]

I was once the traitor, and I think I ended up being too helpful. I got a lot of credit for that, but it didn't help me much.  I ended up winning anyway because they let too many siege engines accumulate. I think it could be a good idea to give yourself away pretty early.

[jsh357]

I haven't tried it, but someone recently told me that the trick to making Saboteur work well without the expansion is to play with a group of cutthroat players, and then play to something like 10 or 15 gold. Then, everyone wants to play somewhat sub-optimally when they're a good dwarf, so that when they're a Saboteur people don't notice when they play somewhat less sub-optimally.

Without the expansion, one way to improve the game is to just switch to the expansion's scoring system.  That way you can at least win by playing correctly.  (The original's was all down to chance pretty much)

[Tables]

The trick with Shadows is that you have to play suboptimally but not get called out on it. You need a pretty good poker face in some instances ("Man, I wish I had Fight 5 cards!"). For some reason, I'm not that big of a fan of playing Shadows with a traitor, but everyone else is, so I go along with it.

Is this a good time to point out that making such a statement would be breaking the secrecy rules ?

Well, true, not that exact statement, but the general point is that when you're staring at a full house of 4s and 5s, you have to pretend you got nothing. But then again, that allows you to get Lancelot's armor. Bad example.

A handful of Merlins or something.

Or, you know, shut up.

Tables - 1
Kuildeous - 0

[Kuildeous]

Tables - 1
Kuildeous - 0

*shakes tiny fist*

[eHalcyon]

I just saw Granny Wars in the BGG news.  Probably not quite the kind of hidden loyalty you are looking for, but man - that theme.



Also, just realized that this thread is in General Discussion instead of Other Board Games.  Doesn't really matter, I guess.

[AdamH]

Update: I got Room 25 and have played it many times. It gets played at least once whenever I'm there for the past few weeks and it's not uncommon for it to come out twice in one night (which is unusual for our group). I still think we're all getting a feel for the game at this point.

One guy we played with liked it enough that he painted those grey figures for me, which really helps when you're trying to tell them apart.

I also have changed the name of the game (at least for our group) to "Room 55" because 55 is my favorite number. I Sharpie™-ed all of the numbers in the game to reflect this. I believe this makes the game significantly better.

We've tried experimenting with play style and with what we say. The game seems difficult for the prisoners to win at this point because it's not uncommon for prisoners to try new things out that turn out to be terrible ideas.

I think we really like this game. The main thing about Resistance is that there are very few mechanics to "hide behind" when one is a spy. The game itself doesn't give you enough information to say for certain who is the spy, so you have to read people. In essence, the game is the metagame. While I like this, it's become a point of contention in our group because some people don't like it. I want a hidden loyalty game that will not cause some people (people I like playing games with) to say "I'll just play the other thing." Room 55 has mechanics to hide behind and these people are happy. Nobody has played it and said they wouldn't play it again.

Another nice thing about Room 55 is that it plays 6 well. Six is an awkward number for our group because a lot of games we have will play six people, but they aren't very good at that number. It's a very easy thing to do to bring this game out and have six people play it for 45 minutes or so.

We're trying to get a hold of Shadows Over Camelot -- we know of someone who owns the game but can't get a hold of him, and nobody wants to buy the game without having played it at least once before hand. Maybe something will change, but for now at least we have Room 55.

I have now gained a reputation in my group as the guy who really likes hidden loyalty games. I could go off on a completely unrelated discussion pertaining to this.

[Qvist]

I'm confused. I guess you mean Room 53?

[AdamH]

I'm confused. I guess you mean Room 53?

It was Room 53 for about a week, then something wonderful happened.

[AdamH]

So when my IRL friend won third place in the tournament in Michigan a few months ago, his prize was store credit at a game store they had there. He decided to get a copy of Shadows Over Camelot and now our group has played several games.

I'd say the group as a whole has figured out basic strategy for how to not just lose at the game: don't actually ever complete the Excalibur quest, try to get Lancelot's armor early (preferably someone near and to the left of the guy who can look at the top card of the bad-things deck). Other than that, doing quests quickly with multiple people is more rewarding than splitting up.

This game feels like a purely cooperative game to me, it really doesn't feel like there is a traitor mechanic at all, since most of the incentive is for the traitor to stay hidden until the end of the game. Granted, I haven't been the traitor in quite some time (it seems the odds of having a traitor present are pretty low) but what can the traitor actually -do- in this game besides fail quests and pretend it was because of their own incompetence instead of being a traitor? The more I play this game the more it seems like the hidden loyalty aspect of Shadows isn't really a main component and it plays more like a fully cooperative game.

[Davio]

I've yet to play my copy of A Study in Emerald.

It adds some funny twists to the genre.

Basically there are two teams and players don't know to which team the other players belong. There will only be one winner in the end, but there will be many losers. All players who belong to the same team as the player in last place are eliminated! So you might be in front on the VP track, but if you think the guy in last is on your team, it might be worth it to stall a bit and let him catch up.

Don't know how this plays out in a real game, but it seems like it could make for a tense game.

[eHalcyon]

So when my IRL friend won third place in the tournament in Michigan a few months ago, his prize was store credit at a game store they had there. He decided to get a copy of Shadows Over Camelot and now our group has played several games.

I'd say the group as a whole has figured out basic strategy for how to not just lose at the game: don't actually ever complete the Excalibur quest, try to get Lancelot's armor early (preferably someone near and to the left of the guy who can look at the top card of the bad-things deck). Other than that, doing quests quickly with multiple people is more rewarding than splitting up.

This game feels like a purely cooperative game to me, it really doesn't feel like there is a traitor mechanic at all, since most of the incentive is for the traitor to stay hidden until the end of the game. Granted, I haven't been the traitor in quite some time (it seems the odds of having a traitor present are pretty low) but what can the traitor actually -do- in this game besides fail quests and pretend it was because of their own incompetence instead of being a traitor? The more I play this game the more it seems like the hidden loyalty aspect of Shadows isn't really a main component and it plays more like a fully cooperative game.

I've only played it once and I don't fully remember it... but there are a fair few places, I think, where cards are played face down.  A traitor can pop poor cards in there and hopefully nobody will trace it back to them when those cards are revealed.  Another thing is to sow discord.  Cast suspicion on people to try to get others to accuse them... then when the accusation is proven incorrect, use that to raise suspicion on the accuser.  You can also start accusing others directly.  I'm not sure, but I think you can continue to accuse people even after you're exposed?  So there's that.

[liopoil]

The one time I was the traitor in Shadows Over Camelot I just sat at the excalibur quest, not helping at all. I also added more siege engines than I would have as a good guy, and that's how I ended up winning. I never got discovered (I did other things so it wasn't obvious), but just playing poorly for a good guy worked well. I suspect it may be sometimes worth it to go all out against the players from the start, or to reveal yourself in the middle of the game at least.

[Tables]

So when my IRL friend won third place in the tournament in Michigan a few months ago, his prize was store credit at a game store they had there. He decided to get a copy of Shadows Over Camelot and now our group has played several games.

I'd say the group as a whole has figured out basic strategy for how to not just lose at the game: don't actually ever complete the Excalibur quest, try to get Lancelot's armor early (preferably someone near and to the left of the guy who can look at the top card of the bad-things deck). Other than that, doing quests quickly with multiple people is more rewarding than splitting up.

This game feels like a purely cooperative game to me, it really doesn't feel like there is a traitor mechanic at all, since most of the incentive is for the traitor to stay hidden until the end of the game. Granted, I haven't been the traitor in quite some time (it seems the odds of having a traitor present are pretty low) but what can the traitor actually -do- in this game besides fail quests and pretend it was because of their own incompetence instead of being a traitor? The more I play this game the more it seems like the hidden loyalty aspect of Shadows isn't really a main component and it plays more like a fully cooperative game.

Shadows isn't great at doing the whole hidden loyalty thing, in my opinion. It's a good game, just... not at doing the hidden loyalty thing. The issue is that in smaller games (3-5 players) the Traitor generally is best off just being obviously evil, placing siege engines and causing trouble, and often the good guys won't be able to keep up. In larger games, there opportunities to do evil things are largely random (e.g. you draw a specific black/white card), or just hoping you can stay hidden until game end. And because of the very random way the game progresses, often it feels like the Traitor just rides along with the game and hopes to win at the end as a result. My group tends to say that the Traitor doesn't win, but the game wins and the Traitor also claims victory alongside it.

It also doesn't help that the traitor tends to be able to do more damage while unrevealed than revealed (not always true, some heroic action plays can be very damaging, but on average and in the long run, discarding a card from a target person hurts more), which means even when you know who the traitor is, it's often best to just not accuse them.

[tolenmar]

Resistance: 15 minutes to play, so it's nice and short.

O_O I haven't had a Resistance game take less than 30 minutes for a long time. Most go on for over an hour. How do your game go that quickly?

I gotta ask you how you make it last that long?

[Tables]

I don't really know how to respond to that. We once had about 15 minutes so we played speed Resistance, where you're only allowed 30 seconds of discussion before missions, and 30 seconds for all voting stuff, and we still barely finished in time and spies won really easily because, we couldn't talk about what was going on. You need time between proposals, and especially before important proposals like the 5th one, or when a mission might be game ending, in order to try and work out what sides people might be on, question decisions people made, think about why people voted the way they did and discuss it. I'd say that on average, from M3 onwards there's about 3-5 minutes of discussion between each mission proposal, with that estimate probably increasing a bit if it's a potential game ending mission. For M1 and M2 it's a lot faster, M1 probably takes 5 minutes total or something small like that, while M2 is probably more like 5-10 minutes. An M3 end is a pretty quick game and clocks in likely close to 40 minutes (If the spies at 2-0 up on M3, at least. If it's the Resistance, you're probably getting a very quick game instead. But this is rare). M4 end is likely around an hour, while M5 end is probably closer to 75 minutes.

Now my group likes to talk and discuss what's going on a lot, but even if you were fairly brief with your discussion periods, I'd think something around 30 minutes or so would be average.

[tolenmar]

That's gotta be it. I can't get my group to get "in character" and talk. It's not unusual for us to spend an hour and play four or five games.

It's to the point where no one gives any thought to mission 1 because (with our group of 5), you get so little information. By mission 3 or 4, we usually have people making random accusations, and getting outvoted because they either a) seem to end up as a spy all the time or b) always throw those accusations out anyway.

I would love to have a game take some time, and be more fun as a result, and less of a filler.