I like to believe I’m a good liar. The key is conviction. You need to lie to yourself first. You gotta trick your brain into thinking “Yeah, that sounds about right”. then you can deploy your falsehoods with more charisma. Telling untruths has an odd place in our culture. We tell our kids they shouldn’t lie, but then tell them to embellish their feats on their resumes. Oh you’ve asked asked your boss for personal leave once? Great! Put it down as “Liaised with management to resolve HR issues in the workplace” As you might have gathered from this loose string of brain dumps, this week’s game is all about being a dirty liar person until you win. Feast your eyes on Coup. But don’t look too closely because wow shiny box.

Coup is a bluffing game for 2 to 6 poker faces. Each player is a shadowy power hungry dude with influence in the cyber punky future-y high fashiony court. You’ll earn money, take actions and call others out on their ability to even take said actions. Ultimately, you’ll hammer your opponents’ influence into dust, leaving only you the victor. Seems easy right? But as we all know, the term ”Seems easy right?” is only ever preceding things that are not, in fact, easy.

Okay here’s the deal: You get 2 crypto-cyber-doge coins and two face-down cards at the start of the game. The face-down cards represent the different members of cyber-court you have influence over, and can safely exploit. When players cause you to lose influence, you turn one of these cards face-up. Once both have been turned over, you’ve lost your influence. No influence means no one wants to carpool to the parliament building with you. And since public transport has no funding in the cyber-jerk future, that means you lose. One of the easiest ways to attack an opponent’s influence is to perform a coup, which requires lots of doge-coins. While you can slowly accrue them through the income action, you can get risky and start using AN ACTION THAT ISN’T INCOME.

It’s risky because the court members exist. Income is harmless enough. You work a futurey 9 to 5 job and come home to your future partner and future children. You have no pets because future P.E.T.A. got their hands on nukes. But if you want to boost your coin gains you can go for foreign aid, beware. Anyone at the table can claim they have the duke, and perform a counteraction to block you. Thus begins the true gameplay of Coup. See, you can claim to have anyone in your sphere (two cards) of influence. You can simply back down and accept the ‘fact’ that your opponent is using their duke to block. OR, they can be challenged.

Anyone can challenge a player on their claims. So you might sit there as Janice touts the power of her duke card, and Toby turns and says “bull-hockey. Prove it”. While insulted that she was referred to as ‘bull-hockey’, Janice admits she has no duke. As a result, she loses an influence. Your foreign aid goes through and you are much closer to performing your next coup. Now had Janice revealed the duke, Toby would have to lose an influence for being such an untrusting cyber-dingus. Many games can be won and lost without coups or assassinations because of this.

Trying to keep track of what narratives each player is spinning is made much harder by the ambassador. Being able to swap your cards out with the central pile (even if you don’t have the guy, remember) can throw the information warfare into disarray. The only reliable way of pinning players down is by getting in a bunch of stabs at their influence. A card turned over is not only unusable to the player, but also curbs the mystery. If all captains are revealed, the steal action becomes A VERY BAD IDEA. As the game progresses, it begins to increase in pace. Once all but one player are eliminated, the game ends.

Coup is a great game to figure out who all the cunning members of your friends and family are. In an open-ended game like this, there is a huge amount of strategy involved. You could slide under everyone’s radar, or be hyper aggressive about your plays. Hell, even honest people can barge their way around the table with a win by getting challenged too often. However you choose to go, I do recommend Coup as a great small game for liars and charlatans.

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