Saboteur
is a card game by Frederic Moyerson, published in the United States by Mayfair Games.Players: 3-10
Time: 30-45 minute
This review is an update of my original, covering the curent, Mayfair Games edition of the game.
The Components
Saboteur is a card game which comes with 110 cards and a rulebook. The cards are divided into: role cards; gold nugget cards; start and goal cards.
Saboteur Card Game in English Brand New in Box. Great family game! Very easy to learn, literally hours of fun! Great for special occasions like Chinese New Year, Christmas gatherings. Players: 3-10 Ga. The official rules for the saboteur board game. If you've lost your original rule set, you've come to the right place.
Quality: All of the cards are printed on high-quality linen-textured cardstock. 5/5.
Beauty: Most of the cards are 'path' cards, which show tunnels and (sometimes) gold. They're fairly plain. There's larger artwork on the role cards and gold nugget cards that's attractive. 3+/5.
Usability: Most cards are tunnels, which are simply placed next to each other. A few cards either destroy or repair equipment, and they're marked clearly with the equipment in question. Overall, Saboteur is a simple game and the cards make it simple to play. 4/5.
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Theming: Dwarves are digging a mine, and some are saboteurs. The theming isn't very dense, but it works. 3+/5.
Overall, Saboteur is a well-produced game with good components. It earns a '4' out of '5' for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Saboteur is to build mining tunnels toward the fabled giant gold nugget — unless of course you're a saboteur.
Setup: The start path card is placed face-up on the board. This shows the entrance to the mine. The three goal path cards are shuffled and placed face-down: one goes eight spaces directly across from the start card and the other two go two spaces above and below it. One of these goal cards has gold, the other two do not!
A set of role cards are shuffled up and one is dealt to each player. These show whether a player is a saboteur or a gold-digger. (The number of saboteurs goes up with the number of players, and you always have one more role card than the number of players, so you never know how many of each role there are in the game).
The main deck is shuffled. Each player is dealt from 4-6 cards depending on the number of players in the game.
Saboteur Card Game Rules
The gold nugget cards, which each show 1-3 nuggets, are shuffled up for later use.
Order of Play: During a turn a player plays one card or discards, then draws one card to replace.
Saboteur Card Game Online
Playing a Path Card. Most cards are path cards, which show tunnels carved through the underground. A player may play a path card if he has no broken tools. It must be connected to existing path cards provided that it has a path back to the start card.
If a path card is played next to a goal card, and it forms an uninterrupted path back to the start card, then the goal card is turned up. If it's the goal card with the treasure, the gold-diggers win.
Playing an Action Cards: Some of the cards are action cards which can be played on yourself or other players.
How To Play Saboteur
Some cards break tools (lantern, cart, or pick), which prevent a player from playing path cards until he's fixed them.
Some cards repair those tools, including some that repair your choice of one of two tools.
A rock-fall card lets you remove any path card (except the start or goal cards).
A map card lets you look at any face-down goal card.
Ending the Round: A round ends either when an uninterrupted path is formed from the start card to the goal card with gold on it (in which case the gold-diggers win) or when the cards run out and no one can play (in which case the saboteurs win).
At this point a somewhat arcane method of distributing gold nuggets occurs.
If the gold-diggers won they take a number of gold cards equal to the number of gold-diggers. Whoever placed the last path card selects one, then they're passed counter-clockwise around the table to gold-diggers until each of them gets won. (The counter-clockwise deal is a nice touch, because it encourages you to help the next player get to the treasure.)
If the saboteurs won they each take 2, 3, or 4 nuggets worth of gold, depending on the number of saboteurs in play.
Ending the Game: The game ends after three rounds of play (with each round resulting in the players getting different role cards and then building a different mine). The player with the most nuggets wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Saboteur is a hidden-role tile-laying game.
Popular hidden role games probably originate with the Mafaia / Werewolf game. Another example is Bang, while traitor co-ops like Shadows over Camelot are somewhat similar. Like many other hidden role games, this one supports a large number of people and basically divides players into two groups, each of which can cooperate for a joint victory.
As a tile-laying game, Saboteur may feel familiar to fans of Carcassonne. It does share some similarities, since they're both edge-matching tile-laying games, but in its pure simplicity, Saboteur is closer to 'pipe' games, which involve laying tiles to connect up two remote locations. Other examples of pipe games include Cheapass Games' Timeline and Steam Tunnel.
Saboteur Card Game
The Game Design
In short, Saboteur is a fun, quick, and unique game. It's the bluffing that really makes the game: trying to figure out how obvious you should be if you're a saboteur (because if you're too obvious, you'll get your tools all broken) and how you can subtly wreck havoc. Guessing who may be a saboteur or a gold-digger also adds a lot to the game.
The tile-laying is pretty simple, but there's just enough grist to keep it interesting.
There is a fair amount of randomness in the game. Which cards you draw, how many saboteurs there are, and what gold nuggets get drawn at the end can all have a big influence on the game. You can sit around a lot during the game if the tool-repair gods don't shine on you, and you can get really unlucky with the gold distribution.
Despite that Saboteur is a fun game, and I'm often happy to play it. It's particularly great as an opener or for casual or party play. As a result I've let it eke in a full '5' out of '5'; for a light game, it's one of the best of class.
Conclusion
Saboteur is a light game of hidden roles, bluffing, and tile laying. It can be fairly random, but that seems like a good match for the length, and thus it's quickly risen to the top of my list for fun and interesting fillers.