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Topicanother year of tabletop rankings and writeups
SeabassDebeste
12/28/19 2:06:45 PM
#23:


130. Sheriff of Nottingham (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bluffing, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 to 60 minutes
Experience: 2 plays (2015, 2016-17) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: 49/100 (2016), 78/80 (2018)

Summary - The nominal goal of Sheriff of Nottingham is Set Collection. You draw cards and attempt to convert them into scoring opportunities by putting them in front of the Sheriff. The Sheriff - and each player gets to be Sheriff twice - is essentially the arbiter of what goods you're allowed to send through. You can tell the truth and send a paltry sum of cards through, or you can lie to the Sheriff and send through contraband - but the Sheriff can choose to inspect the bag as well, either owing or collecting depending on whether they correctly call your bluff.

Experience - My first play of SoN came when I was green as a gamer and highly preferred social games with light rulesets. I played with a group of four which would become the defining gaming group of my initiation. It was delightfully light, and I enjoyed having the Sheriffs inspect my bag incorrectly - you get paid if you're honest and you do get inspected.

Then my second game was in a group of five with people I'm lukewarm on in a meetup, and it sucked. The game lasted forever, I had no money, and people didn't want to honor deals we struck (which I never even tried in the first game). One of the more negative experiences of my life. There is space for a meta to develop if you play with the same people, but like many social games, it's very group-sensitive.

Design -.Why is SoN so sensitive to the group you play with? Well, it's a bluffing game and very confrontational. So if you get ego mixed up in it, it can be pretty unpleasant. There's very little else to the game. That said, there are a few annoying features to it. One is that the set collection mechanic is what drives the need to bluff, and that's mostly done through random draw. If everyone draws well when you're Sheriff, well, you're just fucked, because honesty will be incredibly powerful for them, and you can't do shit about an honest player.

Another issue with SoN is that the game length scales quadratically with number of players, instead of linearly. Each round naturally lasts longer since a Sheriff makes a decision on each other player's bag - but because of the everyone-is-Sheriff-twice rule, the number of rounds also scales up with number of players. It can be very easy to fall behind in SoN with no catchup mechanism (in fact, the more desperately you try to catch up, the more obvious it'll be that you're bluffing.) One aspect I think really improves game experience is if it can be fun to play while losing. My second play of SoN felt like shit while losing, and in a game of this weight, "git gud" isn't a good response.

Future - The game requires an emergent metagame to become replayable, but since it's so delicate on initial play and is so shallow, it doesn't necessarily merit that type of repeated play. I do know many groups greatly enjoy SoN. I think that with the right group that was willing to play very quickly and jump through 30-40 minutes games, I'd be down to play it a few times in a session. But I'm leery.

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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness
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