The Gang with the Golden Gun

Deduction games are as well known as they are numerous. You likely have a favorite even if you aren’t steeped in the modern scene: Codenames, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Hanabi, etc., and that’s without even touching on social deduction where you’re operating on vibes and evidence in equal measure. What you rarely see are induction games, which start players at the end and force them to work backwards. Zendo is an excellent example, a mind-bending game of applying the scientific method to your friends’ bizarre block creations. What I can’t say I’ve seen is a game that applies both in relatively equal measure, until now.

Infiltraitors is a cooperative small box card game ostensibly about rousting traitors in your secretive organization, but it’s really a game of “I have a secret card from the deck and you all need to guess the suit/number”. This is enhanced with its excellent art, comic stylings and heavy shadows making this a deck that I want to use for other games just so I can look at it more. Much like The Crew, there’s a book of scenarios that serve less to deliver a campaign and more just to give your group a variety of challenges to play with, as well as offer some difficulty scaling.

So what do you actually do? Mostly play cards, then start chin-stroking as you think about what each play means. Each game starts with a stack of face-down traitors that need to be eliminated, and a pre-set budget of bullets to do so with. Players take one action each turn but the most important one right now is nabbing a suspect, which is when a player draws a suspect, looks at them, and cannot tell the table anything about them. In most scenarios each player can be responsible for their own suspect, which means you can be playing up to 4 simultaneous deduction games at once. Good start!

How do you actually ID your targets? Cards, naturally. By playing a card in front of one of your teammates, you give them an opportunity to say whether or not the cards have anything in common (oriented vertically for yes, horizontal for no). Get a few cards in front of a mark and you’ll significantly narrow down what they could be, to the point where someone will eventually have the confidence to take a shot at a guess. I mean that literally; the game comes with a golden gun that you are required to pick up, point at your target, and chamber one of your limited rounds to officially declare your guess. It’s a fantastic mini-climax to each suspect, and comes with a small reward to help you push through the next one.

There are more layers here. While players with a suspect in front of them can’t say much, they are also capable of playing cards in front of themselves instead of a teammate. This is costly – you don’t get a free draw afterwards – but it allows the most informed player to help steer their team in the right direction. This hybridization of induction and deduction, and finding the balance in the play of the game, gives Infiltraitors a particularly unique degree of control when compared to games that came before it.

Where this system does hit some snags is in how it handles different player counts, or more accurately, how it doesn’t. You simply deal in more players, which means more simultaneous suspect-plate-spinning, which means the game consistently takes longer. We found this worked wonderfully at 2p, as you have a sort of deduction tennis match the wraps in 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile at 4p the game can take upwards of an hour for a tougher scenario, and that’s just too darn long for what’s on offer. 3p lands in the middle and is reasonable in most cases. Additionally, as is the case with many deduction games, you will occasionally run into delays as particular combinations can stall your table’s brains out. This is also exacerbated by player count, especially in scenarios where limitations on who can do what are far more pronounced with 3 other turns before your next go.

Is that a load-bearing flaw? I don’t think so, though it might be for your group if you tend towards a fuller table. Infiltraitors is a truly unique title regardless of how much time you spend on it. Its mix of deductive elimination, inductive reasoning, and good old-fashioned hunch following makes for a compelling concoction. To achieve all of that with a pack of cards and a cardboard gun is legitimately impressive. It also feels complete as-is, with little need for followup boxes or new scenarios, which feels refreshing in the current expansion-rich environment. I’ve been increasingly impressed with Hong Kong’s game designers for the last several years, and Infiltraitors is further proof that they deserve your attention.

7/10

Review copy provided by publisher.