2373: Sheriff of Nottingham

My brother bought me a board game for my birthday known as Sheriff of Nottingham, and it hit the table for the second time this evening. I was particularly keen to see my friends Tim and James compete against each other in it, because they’re both very good at arguing (they’re both lawyers) and both often get rather competitive — and Sheriff of Nottingham is a game very much designed for argumentative, competitive players.

The mechanics are pretty simple. By the end of the game, it’s your aim to score as many points as possible through a combination of the cash you have on hand and the value of the goods you managed to successfully bring to market. To achieve this, you play through five phases several times.

First up, you look at your hand of six cards, ditch up to five of them and draw replacements from either or both of the two face-up discard piles (which have a small initial stock on them) and the central blind draw pile.

Once you’ve done this, you put up to five cards in your “merchant bag”, a lovely little prop with a pop fastener, just big enough to hide the cards you choose.

Next up, each player declares to the Sheriff player (which rotates each turn) what they’re supposedly bringing to market in their bag. You can (and often probably should) lie about this, because contraband items are worth significantly more points, and there are also big end-game bonuses available for whoever has the most of each of the four “legal” goods, so it pays not to telegraph your intentions to your opponents too early.

Then comes the Sheriff’s time to play, since he hasn’t participated in the previous phases. At this point, he has the choice of whether to inspect each player’s bag or let them through. If he inspects the bag and discovers its contents are not what the player said they were, the offending goods get seized and discarded, and the guilty player must pay the Sheriff a fine. If, however, the inspects the bag and discovers the player was telling the truth, the Sheriff must pay the innocent player compensation for the value of all the legitimate goods in the bag. In order to determine the best course of action, the interaction at this point is completely freeform: the Sheriff can threaten players (within reason!) while players may offer the Sheriff bribes of money, goods or even favours to let them pass without incident.

Once all the merchant players have been inspected or let through, they lay down the cards they were able to keep — legitimate goods face-up, contraband face-down — and the Sheriff role passes to the next player. This then continues until everyone has been the Sheriff twice, at which point the winner is the person with the highest total points, which consist of the points on the cards they have on the table, plus the number of gold coins they have, plus bonuses for having the most or second most of each of the four legitimate types of goods. (There are no bonuses for having the most contraband, but some contraband counts as multiple legitimate goods when calculating these bonuses.)

It’s a really interesting game. It’s simple and quite quick to play, but the interaction element makes it rather fascinating — though at the same time also rather dependent on having a group who are capable of negotiating and dealing with one another rather than just not really knowing quite what to offer or threaten with.

It’s essentially a game about lying — either getting away with lying, or making other people believe that you’re lying when you’re actually telling the truth. After two games, I think we’re still learning the intricacies of appropriate strategies, but it’s been a lot of fun so far, and an eminently good fit for our gaming group as a whole.