The saboteur has struck again - but which of your fellow players is a saboteur? Discover the traitor in your midst while questing for gold in this path-laying card game for 3-10 suspicious dwarves. Saboteur is recommended for 3-10 players ages 8 and up, and takes about 30 minutes to play. In the Saboteur card game, you and your merry band of dwarves are out to mine for gold. After climbing down the ladder, you and your fellow gold-seekers have to tunnel together towards one of three possible spots where gold is hidden. If the team reaches the gold, the bounty will be shared amongst the intrepid miners.

Saboteur is a simple, quick and easy co-operative game with the traitor mechanic. It is an awesome introductory game, with easy to understand mechanics and a short teaching time commitment. While the game isn’t perfect, it’s just a fun compact and not too serious bundle to pull out while in the cafeteria, waiting for a meal or chillaxing at home.

Saboteur begins with each player assuming the role of a garden gnome looking dwarf. You each receive a card which either depicts you as a relatively normal looking gnome, or as a “saboteur”; a French-English word which roughly translates to “jerk-face”. All players keep their identities hidden; the good gnomes are working to build a path using maze pieces to the gold. The saboteur’s goal is to prevent them, causing the draw pile to run out.

Saboteur Card Game

Each player draws a hand of cards; this will have maze pieces, player blocking cards, player unblock, cards or map cards. Maze pieces allow you to make a path, the block and unblock are pretty self-explanatory, and map cards allow you to check one of the three destination cards to see whether it is gold or not. Playing a map card allows only you to check a destination card and upon examining it, to say anything you want to your fellow gnomes. If you are a saboteur you may wish to lie, of course, you may also want to play the sleeper agent and tell them where the gold is. As a sleeper you may be able to make it appear as though someone else is a saboteur if they have a bad hand, then when everyone attacks them, WHAM! No gold for you.

The artwork on the cards is well done. There are little trinkets and fossils scattered throughout the cards to provide fun little distractions and the cards are printed on a hardy quilted paper board. The game’s real only problems come out in the scoring.

Saboteur Card Game Online

If the good gnomes win, the player who is the last person to connect gets first choice and last choice of a random hand of gold. If the bad gnomes win they get a set number of solid nuggets. The random quality of the good gnomes winning hand can seem frustrating. The benefit to it though is that it sets up a race amongst the good guys towards to end to get the best pick of the cards, a situation which sometimes causes them to kibosh each other. Register and get free spins.

In the many times that I’ve played the point distribution has been quite wide. This may be because of the relatively stilted scoring for good vs. evil sides or because of the random quality of the good guys winning deck. The funny thing is that almost every time, no one really cares because it was just so much fun getting to the end of the game.

Saboteur Board Game

GOOD:
Entry Level, Social / Party Game, Mobile, Solid Quality, Not overly serious (friendships will be repairable afterwards)

Saboteur Card Game Image

BAD:
Scoring seems someone iffy, Number of Saboteurs can be overwhelming (4 vs 6 is hard if you’re a good gnome)