Hoax (Second Edition) Card Game First Impressions
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
When an unscrupulous business magnate meets an undignified end, a fierce competition for his estate begins.
I always have a problem with short social deduction games that have a lot of rules. They’re hard to teach, slow due to all the questions and are usually clunky to play.
This one is very close to Coup (although Hoax 1st ed was out first) where you get a hidden role card representing a character. Each character has an action on it and you can use that action on your turn. Alternatively, you can bluff by claiming you have a different character to use their action instead.
The goal is to collect tokens to call out the other players, correctly guessing their roles… you know what, I’ll let the game blurb tell the story…
But first, the best of the 4 pictures I took, think my camera was having a lazy 5 minutes.
Your goal is to eliminate all your competitors by catching them in a lie – but making a false accusation will take you out of the game. If you want to make informed accusations, you must amass resources and spend them to investigate other players. To win, you have to both avoid accusations and judiciously make them, all the while making your opponents believe that all your lies are true. Whoever is devious enough to outlast all the other players wins!
I won by not lying at all (works in Coup too) and was falsely accused… I did play on the fact that someone already said they were my character and I kept my mouth shut. So, I kinda earned my win 🙂
Hoax (Second Edition) Summary
It’s a weird one really. A good idea but too much was involved. But the “OK so what happens now” pause after every accusation (or attempted accusation) was off-putting…
It’s could be OK if everyone played 5-6 times to get to grips with it but it’s just overly complex like Blood of the Werewolf and Templar Intrigue.
With games like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Spyfall, Love Letter etc that let you use a little bit of brain power for rules which frees up the rest for bluffing, lying and provoking, you need to be a very good game.
Jesta ThaRogue
