Saboteur (card game)


Saboteur is a mining-themed card game, designed by Frederic Moyersoen and published in 2004 by Z-Man Games.

Gameplay

Players are assigned either a "Miner" or a "Saboteur" role, and given a mixed hand of path and action cards, and take turns in succession playing one card from their hand and collecting a new one from the draw pile.
Miners may play a path card in order to progress in building a tunnel from a special card which represents the mine start to one of the three special cards that represent possible gold locations, while Saboteurs try to play path cards which actually hinder such progress.
Either player can instead play an action card, which have varying effects such as blocking other players from building paths or unblocking themselves or other players. Action cards can also be used to block other cards depending on the gamers' opinions.
There are three rounds of play, where each round is concluded by either reaching the treasure or running out of action cards.

Setup

The game should be set up where the mine entrance card is separated by seven cards from the middle treasure card, and the other two treasure cards are either above or below, separated by one card each. Cards should all be placed vertically.
Each type of card should be mixed with those sharing the same back design.
Depending on the number of people playing, the character pile should include both miners and saboteurs. Also dependent on the number of people is the number of cards each person should be dealt at the beginning.

Conclusion

A round ends either when a path is established from the start card to the gold card or there are no more cards in the players' hands and no successful path was established. Players in the victory role are then awarded some gold nuggets.
A game is composed of three such rounds, so the majority of the players have a chance at playing both roles. At the end of the three rounds, the player with the most gold nuggets wins.