Coup
review by Brendan
Coup is a game for 2-6 players. For anyone who has played one of the many deduction games such as Werewolf, Among Us, Secret Hitler, or what have you, Coup is basically a Werewolf game where everyone is the Werewolf! Everyone is out to kill each other, and the winner is the last person standing.
The way this works is that each person gets two role cards dealt out to them face down at the start of the game. These are your Influence cards, and if you lose them both, you're dead! There are five total roles, and three copies of each, for fifteen total cards. On your turn, you can choose one of three basic actions, and anyone can use these actions regardless of role. You can take Income, which grants you one coin from the treasury, Foreign Aid, which grants you two coins from the treasury (but can be blocked by certain roles!), or you can spend seven coins to use the titular Coup and kill an Influence card that another player holds! As Influence cards are killed off, they are turned face up to the board, which lets you know what is and isn't still in the running. Money is power, and getting enough of it to take out everyone else is the main way the game proceeds.
But what about the Influence roles? There are five roles! First, the Assassin, who can spend 3 coins to assassinate an Influence card instead of the seven it normally takes to Coup someone. Second, the Contessa, who can block incoming assassinations. Then there's the Duke, who can both block Foreign Aid from other players AND Tax three coins from the treasury instead of two or one like normal players! Next is the Captain, who can both Steal two coins from another player, and also block other players from stealing your own coins! Lastly, the Ambassador, who can also block players from stealing your coins, but can also spend a turn to draw two Influence cards from the deck of unused Influence cards and then put two back (but you can't put yourself back at two Influence cards if one of your two died already!). Most of the roles are fairly simple and easy to pick up, but there are enough reference cards for all of the players just in case you need to double check something.
So great, now that you know all of the actions, let's begin! But oh no, the game starts and we started off with two Contessa cards, are we screwed? Not quite! For there is one more quirk to the game of Coup, and that is that cheating is part of the rules! You see, since your cards are face down, no one really knows what you have, do they? You can pretend to have ANY of the Influence cards! Whenever someone does an action, it will succeed if no one calls it out, even if they don't actually have the respective Influence card! This means you can also call out actions that you think are fishy, and force someone to reveal whether or not they have the proper Influence card. If they don't, then one of their Influence cards dies right then and there! But if they do have it, one of your Influence cards dies immediately!
What ensues is a very quickly paced game that can end in two minutes or less once everyone has memorized the roles. Despite the relatively simple rules, the ability to bluff your way through with a lame hand or instantly take someone out of the game by sniffing out a bad lie leads to a lot of fun strategizing. A player with one last card can pretend to have an Assassin and spend three coins to assassinate you, only for you to pretend to have the Contessa and force them to either drop the issue or risk losing the game on the spot! A game with six people can start, only for every single player to Tax from the center despite there only being three Dukes in the deck! A player with two Contessa cards can pretend to have the Ambassador just to swap out their hand, only to draw two Captains and realize that one of the people who has been stealing coins all game has been lying since the third Captain is already face up dead on the table! The way these mechanics all mesh together leads to a lot of on-the-spot deduction and fun!
To cap off, Coup is one of my favorite games ever. It's very affordable, so it's a very low investment purchase for any fence sitters who get nervous about spending money on something new, and it's super small, so it's easy to throw in a bag or pocket and won't eat up your closet or anything when you put it away. It's easy to pick up and turns are simple, so it's great for casual play while you eat somewhere or drink at a bar. Matches are quick too, so you can kill your friends guilt-free and not have to worry about making them wait a long time for everyone else to finish up. If you're in the mood for a light and quick game that's easy to teach to casual players, but freeform enough to interest all sorts of people, I highly recommend Coup!
Coup is available now from our webstore.
