LogFAQs > #936054595

11. Blood Bound (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Hidden roles, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 15-30 minutes
Experience: 100+ plays over 30+ sessions
Previous ranks: 6/100 (2016), 16/100 (2018)

Summary - Players are divided into two equal teams, handed secret role cards from 1 to 9 corresponding to one team or the other. The goal is to kill the opponent's leader, which is the player with the lowest number. The active player is the one who holds the dagger. Play proceeds with the active player either handing the dagger to another player or stabbing someone. When injured, a player takes damage tokens corresponding to their rank: their rank token (the number), a question mark, or a color that indicates their team. Each role also has a special ability that can be activated once, by claiming the rank token. Four damage will kill someone and end the game.

Design - The first thing that has to be said about Blood Bound is its appearance. The original printing, which I have, has art that looks like Twilight cosplayers. It's undeniably stupid and hilarious.

For a game that lasts so little time, Blood Bound actually requires a fair bit of explaining, since it has so many tokens and since everyone needs to be crystal-clear on how taking damage works. From there, however, the game is extremely fast-paced and enjoyable. In any team-versus-team game, there's usually the opportunity for table-talk. Since neither team is inherently good, it can make sense to claim to be one color one turn and then the other color the next. That said, there's also a lot of concrete information in the game, since players start knowing the affiliation (but not rank) of one of their neighbors. The tokens you take as damage also give information; take a colored token and your affiliation is known (and potentially that's a good thing, since it can avoid friendly fire); take a question mark and the confusion continues.

The card distribution and powers associated with them are mostly the core of the game. You never know exactly which X roles will be present on an opposing team, and eventually it comes down to dire straits where one team will need to gamble that they think they know the leader of the opposing team, even if not every rank token has been exposed. (A common situation is seeing a player with two ? tokens (which guarantees them to be rank 2-4) in front of them, while your team has had their Elder's (1) rank exposed.) It might be worth it just to gamble that 1 isn't in the game and that the ?/? player is the leader. The encouragement of taking risks and the luck of the distribution together lower the stakes of a game and make it great to repeat-play. I've never had a session of BB last only one game, if only because setup is long relative to playtime.

Experience - Blood Bound was played on my very first "game night," and it was my favorite takeaway from that day. I got it months and months later, and it remains a favorite for even numbers.

Future - I've played Blood Bound recently and it clearly still holds up. Even before social distancing, 6+-player game nights were getting scarcer, especially with people who don't like hidden role games as much. One strike against BB is that playing with the Inquisitor is pretty unfun. The second is that this player-count is actually highly competitive for me. Setting aside new games I'd want to learn, there are multiple games above this that are good for six players, of varying weight.
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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