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Topicanother year of tabletop rankings and writeups
SeabassDebeste
01/16/20 10:37:30 AM
#278:


82. Coup (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Hidden roles, bluffing, player elimination
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 15-30 minutes
Experience: 15+ plays over 8+ sessions (2015-2018) with 4-6 players
Previous ranks: 56/100 (2016), 60/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is dealt two hidden roles, representing both their lives and their abilities. Each hidden role has a special power associated with it. Play proceeds clockwise, and on your turn you can either take a basic action or a special role action, claiming that special role. When you claim a role, you can be either challenged or not. Players can "coup" you to take out one of your two lives. Last man standing wins.

Design - Coup can feel messy with its player powers chart at first explaining this and that, but when it comes down to it, it's a fairly elegant design. Once you know every role, the setup and teardown are effortless and individual turns are quick and snappy.

As a take-that-ish game, Coup is a game where you have to accept that you won't always have control over your own destiny. The bluffing mechanism is a really clever way to even out the odds - you can take extra coins early on while it's hard to contest you, but once people have stored up money and it gets higher-stakes, the metagame should sort itself out that challenges are done at times that make sense. Unfortunately, since players have to actively get in conflicts (or be targeted) to lose, Coup often becomes a turtling game.

But, there's something unique in Coup about the bluffing mechanism, since you have full knowledge. "I block as Cortana" call or the "I challenge your Assassin" always gets the table interested, these are both the most common interactions (because they're so direct) and the highest-leverage (due to the elevated stakes that can send you from two lives directly to zero lives). It becomes possibly even more interesting when Captain actions are blocked (will anyone budge?) or especially Duke actions get challenged.

Experience - One of the funnest memories I have of the game (and probably the most fun I've had) was during the first game I played, when an overeager player who introduced us to the game angrily challenged two people in like three turns. She was promptly eliminated after having taken maybe one or two actions herself. Challenges are the most fun part about Coup, but unfortunately, challenging everyone is a losing strategy. The game went on and was never as entertaining.

Future - Coup doesn't make me eager to play it, but sometimes when sitting around with nothing to play, I think, "it would be nice to have Coup now." I've played it on a bus, for example, though it sucked. Nonetheless, due to its ubiquity outside my main circles and light interaction, it's likely to get played again and not particularly rise or fall in rankings.
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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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