Hidden Roles

Who are you in Mascarade? Whoever you want to be...at least until someone else calls you out on it!

Each character receives a face-down role card at the start of the game, and in a game with 4-5 players some role cards are placed in the center of the table. On a turn, you take one of three actions:

1) Announce your character: Claim the power of a certain character and take the associated action. You don't have to have that character card in front of you to take this action, but if someone else says that they're that character and reveals the card to prove it, that player takes the action instead while you lose one coin to the tribunal.

2) Swap cards or not: Take another player's character card along with yours, place them under the table, shuffle them around a bit, then give one card back to the other player while keeping one for yourself. You (presumably) know whether you changed characters and can have some idea of who you are now, but that other player might be in the dark.

3) Secretly look at your character: Look at your character card to make sure of who you are.

Play continues until one player obtains 13 coins and wins — or until a player has lost all of their coins, in which case the player with the most coins wins.

Mascarade includes more character cards than the number of players, so not all characters will be used in each game. The rules suggest that you use certain characters in your first games, but once you know the game, you can try many other distributions.

Note that this second edition of Mascarade includes 17 role cards, with these cards being a mix of roles from the original base game and the 2014 expansion.

A bluffing deduction game for everyone.

Each round involves two missions, depending on whether you’re the Chameleon or not.

Mission 1: You are the Chameleon. No one knows your identity except you. Your mission is to blend in, not get caught and to work out the Secret Word.

Mission 2: You are not the Chameleon. Try to work out who the Chameleon is without giving away the Secret Word.

At the beginning of the round each player receives a card that tells them if they are the Chameleon or hunting the Chameleon. Two dice are rolled and this gives everyone (except the Chameleon) the coordinates to a specific word on a Topic Card – this is the Secret Word for the round. Each Topic Card features 16 related words (e.g. countries, books, food, etc.)

Each player must now say a word relating to the Secret Word. The Chameleon can only make an educated guess based on the 16 words in front of them.

The group has a multiple-choice question and only two minutes to work it out. The snakes amongst you already know the right answer — and they'll stop at nothing to keep you away from it.

In Snakesss, you deal out the cards and try to answer a multiple-choice question with the rest of the players. The more people who get it right, the more points you cash in — unless, of course, you get one of the snake cards. All the snakes already know the answer, so their job is a bit simpler. To score points, they have to sabotage the discussion and mislead the other players.

—description from the publisher

Imagine a dark and desolate realm, filled only with chaos and misfortune, where only the truly evil and most powerful villains can survive and thrive. In a world where everyone is wicked, is there anyone you can really trust?

In Gathering of the Wicked, based on Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, you play as a Disney villain such as Maleficent, Hades, or Captain Hook who is gathering in a dark realm with various henchmen. There, two teams fight for control, alternating between day and night phases. Each night, the villains wake up one by one and use their unique abilities to chase their objectives. Each day, the gathering debates and tries to unmask the traitors amongst them, but since no one knows which team other players are on, trusting each other will be tricky, and bluffing will be their best route to dominance within their new surroundings.

While each role is known by the other players, every character also has a "secret alignment" that determines their objective — making it even trickier to know who to trust!

—description from the publisher

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.

—description from the publisher