Hidden Leaders: My Favorite Mechanism

Jamey discusses his favorite mechanism in the hidden-role, tug-of-war game, Hidden Leaders.

[raphaelstocker]

Hey Jamie, I am such a huge fan of you and the format "my favourite mechanism" but I never imagined you would cover 1 of the games I designed (as part of a team). Thank you so much!
Concerning the tiebreaker you got it wrong: both the face-up and face-down count for the winning faction

[SolviKaaber]

I like the thematical reasons for the tug-of-war. Only the red and green factions have tokens (they represent the sort of an empire and natural beings), and their win condition is just to be more dominant than the other one, the blue faction is the water people and they just want peace between the factions. And finally the black faction is the undead, and they win if both the tokens are really high up (being higher up on the board thematically means having a stronger army), so if both factions are fighting each other a lot, then they make more corpses for the undead to use.

I like how you can somewhat bluff what faction your leader is if you're playing cards of all sorts of factions and you can sometimes play cards facedown to further your tiebreaker with the winning faction.

But my favorite thing in this game is that every single card is different and has both a quirky and fitting name, art, abilities and personality. And the fact that all of this conflict started because the emperor died and he's the starting card in the discard (dead) pile, and you can even use an ability to get that emperor back from the dead and he counts as every single faction for tiebreakers XD.

[MrShinyObject]

It's the only hidden role game inknow of that goes down to two players. That alone is interesting.

[svai]

Very interesting! Thank you for your "Favourite mechanisms" videos!

[thestaticmotionman]

Hey Jamie, can you think of other games that break ties or define winners based on hidden information (not just hidden point value)? I haven't played this, but love the idea!

[tonycorkpa]

I'm a sucker for these streamlined card-driven filler games - I would love if Stonemaier expanded its game offerings into this arena - especially as you like presenting them so much in these videos. 😊