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acesanji
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Sheriff of Nottingham
This is a game that goes in the group of deceiving board games in which the fun comes from managing to make the rest believe your lies to then see them fail in the decisions and grab their money or goods for you.
This said, the main problem with the game is a clear mistake in its design.
If you still don’t know how the game is played then let me simplify it by saying that the game rewards you for playing “legally” and punishes you for trying to deal with illegal goods, which is the actual interesting part of the game.
If you already know what the game is about let me explain myself better.
The risk of trying to get illegal goods through the border is very high. They don’t really reward you with that much of an extra value in comparison to the legal goods, and if you were to be caught, the heavy price to be paid, that does not only make yourself poorer but you enemies richer, puts a huge distance in the scores.
In the other hand, getting a ton of legal goods is 100% safe, and even if you were to receive no extra money from a sheriff opening your legal bag because of misplaced suspicions, it still earns a lot of money because due to how the game works it is simple to pile up groups of 3 or even 4 goods of the same type per bag almost every round. Add to this that at the end of the game having most of the goods of a type gives a hefty amount of gold and the first position is ensured.
In more games than not the winner is the person whom not even once decided to try to sneak anything illegal.
Don’t misunderstand me though. I am not saying that this is a bad game because it has a flaw in the core mechanic of the game (which is certainly not good). I have had a ton of fun playing it. But this is because when I play this is the one of few games that I don’t play to win (and I hate not playing to win!!!!) to instead have extra fun by trying to sneak my pointy peppery apples or receiving heavy bags full of taxes to let the merchants pass without inspection for the sake of fast circulation in the main gate of course.