What I Played Today: September 14

Castle Ravenloft, Saboteur

Went to game night tonight, and played a couple of board games. I walked in with my Castle Ravenloft board game and a drew a bit of attention, so I set it up and started playing. The group seemed to enjoy the game, but they did observe that it was pretty brutal, which is just the nature of the beast with both coop games and Ravenloft. We did pretty well, considering, although it took a remarkable amount of persuading for the cleric to actually heal me even after I had died. (No, man, we still got healing surges.) But a well-placed fireball took out the majority of the monsters we needed to kill all the objective monsters, and so with one last shot, we won with full healing surges. The response was mostly positive, if a bit muted.

We then moved on to Saboteur, one of the first games to really use a hidden traitor mechanic, in which you play a team of dwarves trying (or not) to get some gold by digging paths. But there is a lot in the way, with a bunch of dead-end cards, an ability to take out your opponents, and the game just generally being a jerk. The non-traitors never won a round when we played, because even when we identified the saboteurs and shut them down, we still didn’t have the resources we needed to get to the gold.

There was a particularly good case of a saboteur in the third round, in which one of the players just started throwing down broken gear, loudly proclaiming that he couldn’t let the player in the lead (his wife) win. He seems so intense about it, and I just assumed he was just being a bit of a jerk. I was the saboteur that round, and I was playing the game I usually did when I was in the traitor role; playing it smooth and pretending to be helpful until the best time to screw everyone. He was already busy breaking everyone’s gear, so I just waited until a late moment to break his gear and the gear of the fifth guy, leaving everyone but me unable to add to the field. However, after some fixes, he threw down another breakage on someone who was clearly not a traitor. He had me fooled, I just assumed he was being unsportsmanlike, but turns out he was on my side, and we prevented the miners from winning for the third time in a row.

I do think that other games have definitely done this mechanic better (Battlestar 4 Life), because there are plenty of situations where the people who are trying to complete the goal just won’t be able to do it because they don’t get the resources they need, but it was still a simple way to do the traitor mechanic. Could be simpler, but early games have it rough.

(NOTE: I realized when posting that I already had the game Saboteur on my labels list, which I found odd since this is the first time when I played the game about the dwarves. Then I remembered the game about Nazis in Paris for the Xbox, which is completely different. So let it be stated that this one is about dwarves.)