Staked!
- Board's Eye View
- 23 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Werewolf is the godfather of social deduction games where players are divided into villagers and werewolves, with each trying to kill the others. There have been countless werewolf variants, with Bezier Games alone having published several different packages introducing different werewolf and unique villager characters and powers. As you'll have guessed from the title, Staked! has vampires rather than werewolves as the protagonists but that is really only a minor variation on the theme. Still, Will deManbey's design doesn't merely substitute bloodsucking vampires for rapacious werewolves.
In Staked! all the 6-10 players are presenting as vampire hunters. They each have individual portraits, flavour text and a number so you know who's who but they don't have any individual unique powers or abilities, at least in the basic game. As in pretty much all social deduction game, players are each dealt a face-down role card. You look at your own card but keep it hidden throughout the game. One of the players will secretly be the Vampire Lord and, depending on player count, one or two other players will also be vampires. An initial eyes-closed 'night' phase means that vampires know which other players are also vampires.
Players have voting tokens and, each round, there's a sand-timer timed three-minute debate during which players must allocate their face-down stake and feast tokens. Slowcoaches are penalised: if you haven't allocated your tokens before the sand-timer runs down, the tokens count against you. In the first round, the player who has been given the most stake tokens is 'investigated': they share their face-down role card with another player of their choice... In subsequent rounds, having the most stake tokens results in you getting staked (killed). One of the strengths of Staked!, however, is that player elimination doesn't mean you are eliminated from the game. In Staked! characters that are killed continue as ghosts. Their votes can protect other 'living' players, potentially taking them out of contention for being staked and from being made the Alpha, and they can still win if their side is victorious. Also it is the ghosts who determine the outcome of ties. Staked players also get to apply a randomly drawn 'Last Will' card that affects the other players.
The player who is allocated the most feast tokens becomes the 'Alpha' player for the next round. They vote using the Alpha tokens in place of their ordinary tokens: a feast, a double stake and an investigation token. Whoever is given the investigation token must share their role card with the Alpha player. Watch out tho' - if the Vampire Lord is ever investigated, the player with whom they share their card is immediately mesmerised so that they are converted to the vampire's side regardless of what's indicated on their role card...
Tho' there's much in the game that will be familiar to veterans of other social deduction games, Staked! manages to bring some fresh blood to the table. The possibility of mesmerisation adds a extra frisson of excitement to each round's investigation; and there's even more scope for bluff and double-bluff than in similar Werewolf-style games. We've also particularly appreciated the changed but still potentially powerful ghost role of players who are dispatched during the course of play. And the game comes with an inbuilt expansion in that you can add in 'Sacred Relics' that give each player an individual ability or unique effect at a set point in each round - at least while that player still lives :-)
All in all, Staked! is a welcome addition to the genre. It's at its best at higher player counts but the timers keep gameplay brisk, so even at 10 players you can expect games to take no more than around 45 minutes.