by Cassie Fischer
I love bluffing games (like Skull and Coup) because the strategy changes so drastically with each playthrough. On the first round, especially with a new group, nobody takes any risks while they learnt he others’ strategy. But before too long, players are lying through their teeth, or telling the truth through their teeth, as play changes from minute to minute as past honesty or treachery is factored into the calculus.
The Sheriff of Nottingham is no different. Players trade off being the Sheriff of Nottingham each round, the brutal tax enforcer of the marketplace, and the rest of the players act as merchants trying to bring their goods to market. Merchants start with a hand of five cards, representing either low-value legal merchandise or high-value illegal contraband. In the first phase of each round, players can discard as many cards as they want and replace them, with the discards often closely examined by the Sheriff to get clues on their hand. Then the merchants put as many cards as they want into their market pouch and hand it to the Sheriff, declaring how many cards are in the pouch, which must be truthful, and the single type of legal goods that are supposedly in the pouch, which the merchants can lie about.
There’s something deeply psychological about handing my pouch to the Sheriff and watching them taunt me while holding my illegal goods. I feel far more threatened when the Sheriff holds the pouch I lied about than if it were still in front of me – like I was a middle schooler who just got in trouble. After all merchants have declared their goods, the Sheriff has the right to inspect any pouch, paying a penalty to the merchant if the contents match the declaration or exacting a fine from the merchant if there was fraud at hand, as well as throwing out goods in violation. But uniquely, the Sheriff can also accept a bribe from any merchant, and is bound by the rules of the game to return the pouch unopened when the bribe is handed over. Once the Sheriff has either inspected or handed back every pouch, the players add the value of their cards to their hand and a new player becomes the Sheriff.
The height of the game’s excitement comes when the Sheriff grills each merchant about their pouch. Sheriffs would try to scare merchants into believing that their pouches were about to be opened, most of the time to extort money out of them. “Really? Only three apples in here? That’s not worth very much. I suspect you have something much more valuable in here…” More often than not, Sheriffs would fish for bribes rather than actually open the pouch, only inspecting the bags of players who refused to pay up or egregious repeat offenders.
I discovered the dominant strategy for our table a couple turns after the player to my right, who ended up winning: I would stuff my bag with high-value contraband items, that would be discarded if the Sheriff set eyes on them, and whenever the Sheriff got around to grilling me I would pay a low bribe of 7 or 8 coins in exchange for receiving well over 20 coins’ worth of illegal goods. I only got away with this because nobody looked very closely at all the contraband I was pocketing on my board after rounds, and the Sheriffs in my game preferred to receive bribes rather than open pouches. Playing honestly (not smuggling any contraband) didn’t win very many coins in our game, but would be stronger if Sheriffs conducted more inspections.
I feel like I learned something about game theory while playing The Sheriff of Nottingham – the math kind, not the tabletop kind. The Sheriff and the players all had unique incentives, very few of which lined up with real-life legal codes. If the systemic conditions are right – an underpaid official who doesn’t receive market value for the goods they confiscate, a broken tax code that only lets merchants declare one kind of good, extremely valuable contraband, and binding bribery – an absurd amount of corruption springs forth. Since winning the game is much more important to players than obeying the law, I can understand just a little bit more how real corruption develops. It’s not very often that a game teaches me something about reality while also being delightful to play!
