Saboteur is a social deduction, tile-placing game where the players are a team of gnome miners and the goal is to build a path to find the gold in the mine. Among the player team is 1-2 saboteurs whose goal is to inhibit the miners and prevent them from reaching the goal without being discovered.
The set up places a starting card and three treasure cards at fixed positions from the start. The players must then build a path from the start to the treasures, at which point they can reveal if the one they reached has gold or coal. Each player’s turn consists of playing 1 action card. Every player, miner and saboteur alike, have access to the same cards: path tiles to be placed, peeking at one of the three treasure cards to see if it’s gold or coal, removing a path tile, breaking another miner’s tools, and fixing broken tools. The only advantage that the game provides the saboteurs over the miners is that no one knows anyone else’s role. Not even the saboteurs know each other.
The win condition for the saboteurs is that no miner is able to continue building towards the gold. However, we found this to be an incredibly challenging goal to accomplish. Placing down path cards that are not helpful to the team but are also not so detrimental that it reveals your identity was a tricky balance to find, one that we were never able to find in three runs of the game. In our playthrough, the saboteur usually found themselves getting hit with broken tool, which meant they couldn’t place path cards, and there seemed to be more tool breaking cards than tool repairing cards. Even if they were to convince someone to repair their tools, often times they were just hit with another one. With their tools broken, the only avenue for sabotaging the other players is to break their tools, but given the numbers advantage the miners have, it was much more difficult to keep their tools broken.
In the most effective saboteur playthrough my group had, the saboteurs convinced the miners to work toward the wrong treasure card. However, though this did waste some time path cards, the miners had very little trouble making it to the other two treasure cards before finding the gold on the third one. This was, in part, because each treasure card, whether coal or gold, is a four way path card, so traveling from one treasure to another is fairly easy.
Throughout the games, it did not feel like there was enough opportunity for the saboteurs to sabotage significantly enough to make the miners fail, especially while going undiscovered. Even when they lied successfully and convinced the miners to go to the treasure card furthest from the gold, there was still enough resources remaining for the miners to not go through just one of the remaining cards, but the second remaining card as well. Some additional methods the game offers to the saboteurs is path cards with dead ends, but placing these is a dead give away of the saboteur role because the miners have zero incentive to place a dead end card. What’s worse, is that the Rockfall card allows the removal of a path tile from the board, so the effect of the dead end card, in most circumstances, is a temporary obstacle at best.
Some of the ways this game could make the saboteur role feel more accomplishable was ending the game when one of the treasure cards is reached. I thought this would be the least compelling way to strengthen the role because the game is themed around digging a mine. Should the player find coal, it makes sense that they could continue digging in other routes to keep looking for gold.
Another way would be to allow the saboteurs to know who the other are. This would strengthen the role from as you start the game with an ally, which can make efforts like lying to the other players or creating difficult to navigate paths easier.
The most compelling to me would be to create some incentive or reason that even a miner would want to play a dead-end card. While the dead-end cards could be an effective tool for the saboteur, both their impermanence and that they almost immediately reveal you as a saboteur minimizes the benefit they can provide the player.
While the game is fun to play as a quick and fast social game, giving more power and viable options to the saboteur role will make it more challenging for the miners to win every round. Playing as saboteur just felt like a lost round which made the role more difficult to enjoy.
