There’s something to be said for a cooperative game. It’s nice to get together with a group of friends to take on a shared challenge. This explains the rise of escape rooms over the past few years, as groups bond over a shared task, combining their skills and wits to solve a puzzle.
Cooperative board games follow the same principle, but many include an extra element. This element is that of the hidden traitor. Traitor mechanics allow for one or more of the players on the team to actually be secretly working against the others. This adds an increased level of suspicion as players not only work on completing shared (and possibly personal) objectives, but also on sniffing out the traitor.
A few years ago, I wrote an article exploring this idea. In it, I covered four games:
- Shadows Over Camelot
- Battlestar Galactica
- Betrayal at House on the Hill
- Specter Ops
Each played quite differently, which is why I chose these four examples. I’m actually still quite happy with the article. That said, things do move on, and were I to write it today, there are some other games that I would include.
Dead of Winter is one of those I would add. Mainly this is because I just really love the game and would take any opportunity to talk about it. The game is already a pretty tense one where players are conflicted between giving up items for the common good and the survival of the colony, and hoarding these same items for the completion of a secret, personal goal or just to protect a favoured character. This gives a baseline level of suspicion before we even get to the possibility of a traitor in the colony.
Another game that I would include is New Angeles. This is something of a spiritual successor, at least mechanically, to Battlestar Galactica. A lot of the technical aspects of the traitor in BSG will apply here as well. Thematically, we go from being Colonial survivors on the Galactica to playing as cyberpunk megacorporations competing for influence over the titular City of New Angeles. Each player is competing for influence, but players also need the city as a whole to function in order for the corps to maintain control. If the city fails, the state will step in and take control. One corporation may be a collaborator, working with the government to end the corporate stranglehold on the City, albeit ultimately for their own gain. I love this game. I don’t play it enough.
Something I should point out is why I don’t include games like Werewolf or The Resistance in here. My focus in this article was on cooperative games that could quite happily be played without any traitor at all. In many of the games, there’s even a chance there won’t be a traitor at all. The potential for having no traitor is another great touch. It’s always fun to discover at the end of a game that, despite all of your suspicions to the contrary, everyone was loyal and all of that doubt and mistrust was ultimately for nothing.
No Rerolls 
1 Comment