Saboteur – Part 1

Hello everybody, my name is Barker and you may recognize me from such trading card games site as TCGHell.com. There, I wrote exclusively about TCG’s such as Magic: the Gathering (mostly), Game of Thrones TCG, World of Warcraft TCG, Yu-gi-oh! and so on. Here on TableTopHell I’m going to focus on a completely different type of games. I’m sticking with card games, but here I’m gonna write solely about so-called “standalone” card games. They may consist of just a pack of cards or they could sometimes include some other objects like a board, dices, figurines or something else, but 2 things that ties them together are: they are mostly played with cards (for example, Battlestar Galactica uses cards but it is not a card game), and everything you need to play them is boxed in one package. That is the main difference between TCG’s and standalone card games – you don’t need additional cards, boosters or investments of any kind. Just buy THE game, and you’re ready to go. Some of them are so successful that they had an expansions made, but you don’t need them to play the original game. If so happens that you like the original so much, then you’re free to purchase an expansion and further enjoy your favorite game.

But enough with the chitchat, let’s move on to the game of the day. For my first text on tabletophell I wanted to write about something special, so I chose my all time favorite multiplayer card game – SABOTEUR!

You are dwarves digging for gold in the depths of a mine. Suddenly, a pick-axe breaks and the light from the lantern goes out. The saboteur has struck again! But which of your fellow players is a saboteur? Will you find the gold first, or will the saboteur’s sinister actions be successful?

In this game, you take the roll of a gold digging dwarf searching for the gold nuggets at the end of the tunnel, OR the roll of an evil dwarf trying to stop the others from achieving that goal. There are 11 Role Cards which each either depict a gold-digger (7 cards) or a clearly labeled saboteur (4 cards).

So, there are more “good dwarf” cards then saboteur cards, meaning there will always be more players trying to get to the gold. This is a game for 3-10 players, so some dwarf and saboteur cards will be removed from selection accordingly to the number of players playing the game.

After that, we have Gold Nugget Cards. These are reward cards. There are 28 total, and each distinctly shows 1, 2, or 3 gold nuggets.

At the end of the game, winner is determined by the total number of gold nuggets he or she possess, so these are very important.

Then, we have Start and Goal Cards. These four “path” cards outline the game board. The start card has four unblocked exits. The goal cards, meanwhile, either show a big black stone or a huge gold nugget; they also have 2 or 4 exits. Each of these cards has a unique back which make them easy to distinguish from the rest of the cards.

Start card is shown on the bottom of the screen, and 3 finish cards at the top

Every game starts the same! You place the Start Card at the bottom, and 3 Goal Cards face down at the top. Shuffle 3 Goal Cards before you place them, so no one knows where the gold nugget is. There are exactly seven places (seven rows) for cards between Start and Goal Cards.

To be continued!