LogFAQs > #967851479

14. Bloodbound

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/130877/blood-bound

Category: Team vs team
Key mechanics: Hidden roles, social deduction
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 10-20 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 30+ plays over 12+ sessions with 6-12 players

In Bloodbound, each player is a vampire-cultist looking person, randomly assigned to one of two clans. A player also has a rank, one to nine, which is associated with special powers. The leader of a team is the team with the lowest rank. The game centers around a dagger, which is either passed to another player or used to stab another player. Getting stabbed means showing damage, which people can use to deduce your rank/clan. The game ends when someone is killed. If the killing player successfully killed the leader of the opposite clan, their clan wins. If they killed anyone else, then their clan loses.

I love the concept of these social deduction games. The endgame is so decisive - either you successfully killed someone, or you didn't. That's not to say it's always climactic, since the last few moves once most everyone is revealed can be a technicality, but the process of getting there is always cool.

There's also just something cool about the turn structure of Bloodbound - you don't go in a circle, and it's not entirely freeform. Instead, the player with the dagger is the active player. And that player determines who plays next, either by passing the dagger - a way of either deferring responsibility or conferring trust - or by stabbing someone, obviously an aggressive move that also gives information to the table. It's a very direct way of getting other people involved in the game, and I love the in-your-face but also nothing-personal player interaction in the game. The game also allows for other players to intervene in a stab by offering to take their rank token (and thus both reveal their rank and use their one-time player power) - though the stabbed must accept the offer.

Bloodbound doesn't entirely cast you into the dark and make you stab completely at random. At the beginning of the game, you get to see the color (but not rank) of one player sitting adjacent to you. (Naturally, this information can be obscured by a special role.) And when players get stabbed, they can take two damage tokens in an order of their choice - a question mark or a color (of their team). The tokens they are allowed to take are determined by their rank, so even before you've hit the rank token, you've got some information.

I find Bloodbound best at six or eight. Higher than that, and the game can often be determined by which leader gets arbitrarily targeted first, and it takes longer to get everyone involved. However, everyone's ability to get involved in the conversation to deduce a leader, or to offer their rank token as tribute, keeps the game pretty engaging still. And the runtime doesn't get too much worse.

I first played Bloodbound on the day I'd say that I really started playing hobby games. Remains one of the neatest social deduction games in my eyes.