Bluffing

Cosmic Encounter – Improve your diplomacy

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Create alliances, negotiate and bluff; in other words, practice diplomacy.  That's what's at the core of Cosmic Encounter, a 3-5 player game that plays in about 1,5 hours.  In this game you'll take on the role of an alien race battling for the supremacy of the galaxy. But don't mistaken this with a tactical game, you won't be a general here: you'll be a diplomat. The main game mechanics can be summarized and simplified as follows: Each player will take on the role an alien race with a special power and have 5 planets on which initially there will only be space ships of his race.  Also, each player will have cards in his hand which he will be able to use, primarily for resolving attacks, but also as special abilities.  The goal of the game is to have 5 colonies (ie. space ships) in other player's planets. To do this, players will take turns at attacking each other's planets.  At the begining of a player's turn, he will draw a card that will tell him which other player he will [Read full post...]

Sheriff of Nottingham – Improve your negotiation skills

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Negotiate, negotiate and negotiate.  Sheriff of Nottingham allows you to do one thing, but it does it really well!  This is a light, social and really fun game for 3-5 players.  The main game mechanic for Sheriff of Nottingham could be described as follows: Each turn, one of the players will play the role of the Sheriff, and the others the role of merchants that are trying to get goods past customs, of which the Sheriff is in charge. The game has 2 types of goods (represented as cards): legal and ilegal. In each turn, the merchants will put all the cards they wish (legal and/or ilegal) from their hand into a bag and give it to the Sheriff, who will decide if he lets the goods into the city without inspections or if he decides to open it.  If he inspects the bag, he will receive gold for all the undeclared goods, but if the merchant had truthfully declared his goods, the Sheriff will have to pay him for them and the merchant may keep them. Merchants are allowed to negotiate [Read full post...]

The Resistance: Avalon – Improve your people reading skills

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Detecting lies, reading people's ulterior motives, negotiating, deducing, bonding a team and deceiving: that's what The Resistance: Avalon (from now on, just "Avalon") is all about. This is a great 5-10 player game for practicing you people skills.  Summarized, the game goes like this: Each player is dealt a random character (card), which will belong either to the Good or Bad team; each player will keep his character secret throughout the game.  The Good team members will not know to which team the other players belong to, but the Bad (which are a minority) do from the begining of the game. For several rounds (depending on the number of players), all players will vote which subgroup of players will go on a mission; then, that subgroup will vote if they make that mission a success or a failure.  The Good players will want to make the mission a success, and the Bad players a failure; but if even just one of the players votes the mission a failure, it will fail.  So the idea of [Read full post...]