Game 64: Saboteur

 The game Saboteur was introduced to us a couple of years back by our friends the Gerdes Family.  It's a good one, but it had been a while since we'd played it.  We pulled it out early in this Thanksgiving week and played with family who had arrived from Southern California.  We use a combination of the original and the Saboteur 2 expansion.  It's a game that can easily be taken more or less seriously, as the mood dictates.  I was more interested in visiting with family than in being super strategic, and it worked just fine.  This is a game involving dwarves mining for gold.  Each player has a secret role (blue dwarf, green dwarf, boss dwarf, saboteur, engineer, etc.) for which they gain more or less gold at the end of each round depending on how the building of the mine goes.

 The building starts with the card you see in the foreground in the picture above - the card with the ladder on it.  For most players, the crystals you see on these cards don't matter, but the player who has the role of engineer earns a gold piece for each crystal in the mine once building is over.  Because of this, the engineer might want to build in such a way as to prolong the game, hoping to get more cards out there with crystals on them.

 I think Anthony and David were taking the game more seriously than I, given the looks on their faces!  At the bottom of the picture above you can see two of the three face-down cards we are building toward.  Two of these cards have coal on them; the other has gold.  The goal (unless you are the saboteur) is to build to the gold.

 You'll notice that some paths have green or blue doors on them.  These allow only dwarves of that color to pass through.  In the picture above we were close to building a path to the gold cards, but somebody must not have liked the way things were going, as a couple of pieces got blown up (yet another thing that is possible with a given action card).  Below you see that pieces have been replaced, and we've built all the way to one of the face-down cards.

 A game consists of three rounds of building.  Role cards are shuffled and re-dealt each time, so you might end up with a different goal in each of the rounds.

 In this particular game I was a blue dwarf (as you can tell by the color of my coat below), but I got no gold because as a blue dwarf I can't pass through the green door in the path to the treasure.  Alas, better luck next time!