Combining both push your luck and hidden role mechanics, Traitor’s Tide is a great warm-up game for three to six players.
Traitor’s Tide is a quickfire hidden role board game that puts you and your friends as the crew on a ship, however, at least one of you are a traitor and the traitor ship is in close pursuit. For 3-4 players there’ll be one traitor, while a 5-6 player set up will feature two. That said, the traitor role is largely played in the mind of players, with the push your luck mechanic something that’s easy to play up or play off as a need or want to win.
What I mean by that is that Traitor’s Tide‘s gameplay is played out through player’s taking turns rolling five dice until they either cash out or bust out (by rolling three wave faces). with up to two partial or complete rerolls available. Due to the nature of dice, you could go bust on the first roll — dealing one of the required six pieces of damage to the ship — meaning that the whole game could be over in between six and eighteen rolls if the players push too hard or are unlucky.
However, if you bank out before rolling three waves then you’ll gain coins equal to the face on the dice, and as the shipmates’ total at the end is the sum of their scores, it makes sense for them to bank low and often. The negative is that anytime there are more pirate flags face up than swords, the difference is put on the rival ship, and if the ship takes damage (from three waves) it also gains gold. That and, of course, the traitor(s) will be trying to get as much gold as possible as their score is the sum of traitors and rival ships.
The final wrinkles come in the accusation phase (where players gain or lose gold if they guess the traitor(s) correctly or incorrectly) and that there are only 40 coins in the game. The accusation phase starts when the ship has taken six damage or if all of the coins are assigned to players, although traitors will often try to push for ship damage and it would be hard for them to win through other means.
Traitor’s Tide is a fun little warm-up game, and there are a couple of extra strategies that can crop up with repeated play such as a traitor who deliberately banks out early and accuses risk takers of being the traitor, or two traitors who specifically target each other with accusations throughout the game to throw attention off of one or both of them.
Traitor’s Tide is available now from the Big Boss Battle Shop.
