So I had this idea for a new game variant where one of the heroes actually wants the villain to win.
The idea came from the party game mafia where one player slowly kills off the rest of the group unless they catch him.
So my thought was one player starts out as the traitor and undermines the rest of the team, while trying not to let the others know.
The game would be played with closed hands under the honor system, and no one should tell their team what they have in hand. This is to protect the traitor from easy detection.
At the end of every round a vote occurs where each player may vote on who the traitor is. If a majority picks a single player that person takes one irreducible damage from every player, including themselves. This damage ignores effects like ground pound or telepathic cocoon.
I'm not sure on victory conditions yet, but we have to have them before the game starts.
For the first game I was thinking Dawn would be the villain, for mechanical and story reasons, with little preference on the environment other than I only have core plus ST and mini expansions
Any feedback is welcome and thanks for reading.
It could be interesting, but I'm not sure that Sentinels has enough secret information to make it work. The traitor's only methods of betrayal are mostly inactive (e.g. not playing something that could help) rather than active. Also, Citizen Dawn is hard enough when all the heros are working together, and now you want to make one evil? Severe rebalancing would be needed.
Have you played Shadows over Camelot or the Battlestar Galactica board game? Both of those are excellent examples of exactly the style of game you described. Betrayal at the House on the Hill is another "mostly cooperative" game, but it functions differently - it's totally cooperative until a certain event triggers and then someone becomes a traitor, but the traitor is not secret.
My suggestion would be that instead of trying to create house rules to make a traitor work, create a villian with a traitor (Baron Blade - Mind Control Helmet Inventor) with its own deck. You could then add in effects that the traitor can use while keeping the game balanced. The flip condition could be the discovery of the traitor.
"Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?"
- Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
I'd be willing to give it a shot. It seems like a decent enough idea. How can you tell who is inactive vs. someone who has a bad hand. Also I could see fanatic pulling out a wrathful retribution on someone other than the villain which would be funny. Innactive and then bang! big hit on a hero. But not against dawn maybe akash or another villain that takes a longer amount of time for the traitor so he/she can set up his or her stab at the perfect time but isn't too difficult on their own.
That works fine, I picked dawn because she could have a citizen in disguise on the team and she can be beaten under normal circumstances but with minimal effort from the traitor it could go the other way. The traitor only has so many ways for messing with the team so giving an above average villain is important for balance.
Citizen bartender?
Jsz2 explain your idea a little more I'm not quite getting it.
My idea is to create a villian who's game play includes one of the heroes being a traitor. So instead of creating house rules to make "traitor mode" work, the rules are described on the villian card.
The villian's setup section would detail how to choose the traitor, and the villian could have abilities and cards that deal in hidden information.
For example:
Confusion in the Ranks [One-shot]: Each hero looks at the top two cards of the deck of the hero to their left. Put one card on the top of the deck, and the other on the bottom. Play the top card of the villian deck.
The villian card would also have rules for accusing the traitor, and if a traitor is correctly accused, then the villian would flip, and they're second side would detail how to deal with a revealed traitor. (You would probably need some DR for damage dealt to and by the traitor. Heroes deal way more damage than they can take.)
Does this help?
Note that my example card is flawed in that it helps the heros more than it helps the villian (since there're more real heroes than traitor heroes), but it was meant as an example of a card that creates hidden information. So the traitor can put the less useful hero card on top, while the heros put the more useful cards on top, with no one the wiser about who is who.
"Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?"
- Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
That could be a really fun villain.
Must work on this.
My only problem with that is it may break forum rules for posting custom characters and that it is a lot of work that I'm not qualified to figure out.
That said, if that character existed, it would be crazy fun to play
Yeah we are pretty much at the limit of what we can do on this forum with this discussion.
But that's why the BGG Variants forum exists.
Yeah and that's why if I wanted to play a game like this it would have to be house rules