Intrigue Board Game Review

Year Published: 1994

Players: 3-5

Playing Time: 45-60 Minutes

Do you need new friends? Are your old ones becoming tiresome? Well, sir or madam, do I have the solution for you.

Intrigue! Yes, this broken, fragile, petty piece of garbage from 1994 will have married couples swearing to make the others’ life a living hell within 15 minutes, and will immediately shock all of your well-adjusted friends who enjoy modern hobby buzzwords like “positive interaction” and “catchup mechanics.” One play of Intrigue and you will never see these pesky people again.

If you think this might be just the lifestyle change you need, don’t delay! Fire up this forgotten negotiation backstab-a-thon today!

Intrigue – A Summary

You are the lord or lady of an estate, and you command a small team of scholars. But you can’t pay them. They must be sent to rival estates to earn income for you. And you must similarly open your doors to others’ scholars in order to create equitable relationships.

Except nothing is actually equitable. Every single visitation from a scholar will invoke a negotiation, wherein you make a deal that probably seems fair on the surface. You take your bribe and any future promises…

…and then you do whatever you want. With a few minor restrictions, no deal is binding. You can collect a large ransom for a juicy spot in your estate, then stick them in the lowliest position. Or, worse, if another scholar of the same type is vying for the position, you might pocket the money and simply send them packing. Sorry, there’s already an in-house musician here. Better luck next time, and thanks for the generous donation!

Go against your word on enough deals and no one will do business with you, which spells doom. But if you don’t exploit some weakness in the deliberations, you’ll be taken advantage of and allow someone else to win.

There’s an official turn structure to the game, and a few small things I’m leaving out, but those are the basics.

Edition Note

The game has had at least a couple editions, one of which featured four areas in each estate and 8 scholars per player, and another with five areas and 10 scholars.

If you end up tracking it down, I’d recommend going for the 4-and-8. The other is simply longer and to my eye might overstay its welcome slightly at higher player counts. Part of the game’s appeal is how compact it is, and how much it manages to stuff into its roughly hour-long playtime. This would not be enhanced with more of the same.

I’ve heard opposing opinions on which edition is better, but I think it’s uncontroversial to say that even if the one with 10 scholars is better for you, it comes with greater risk.

A Comparison to Job Searching

This next sentence is going to sound unbelievable to some of you, but I promise it’s true: I have applied to thousands – plural – of jobs in my lifetime.

Call it bad luck; graduating at the height of the housing recession in 2007, with no real-world experience and thousands of applicants for a dwindling pool of teaching jobs, as schools “absorbed” retiree workloads into their existing staff, crunching the demand nationwide. One school I managed to get an interview with was candid in admitting they had over 700 applicants for a single teaching position.

The first thousand applications were sent before I got my first real career-style job. I went from “Oh boy, here are the five places I’d love to work!” to considering whether or not it was worth applying to prisons several states away that needed teachers and would take any warm body.

You get used to rejection in such an environment. You also get used to taking what you’re given by those in higher positions than you. You don’t have other options.

Does this sound fun? Hopefully not. It was more like the Hunger Games. Not reading the books or watching the movies, that is. But fighting for your life against a bunch of others reluctantly doing the same. My life wasn’t on the line, but spiraling into debt was, or making rent payments.

Intrigue reminds me a bit of this grind, but doesn’t trigger legitimately negative emotions like that walk down memory lane does.

Games allow us to explore situations that would be awful in real life and interface with them through more palatable means. Here, you’re both the rejector and rejected, and get to gleefully – rather than woefully – inhabit either role. It’s an exploration in creating agreement when the incentives for doing so are temporary, at best.

There’s also some minor roleplaying involved. “We’re friends, right?” You might say this to an opponent. And it might be true. You might have every intention of keeping your agreements with them. At least for a while. Harboring these two conflicting truths is fascinating, because it’s not something we’re asked to do often in our lives.

But you both understand that you’d like to honor your deals and – like an employer that just went through a merger or that is having a tough quarter – there will come a point where you’re dutifully walking an employee into the back office to tell them their position is being eliminated. We’d like to wish you luck in future endeavors, and let us know how we can be of assistance. HR will get you set up with information on COBRA benefits and discuss turning in your work uniforms.

Matching Game to Group

I’m depressing myself a bit here. I’ll need to find a way to turn it around. Intrigue is petty, gleeful fun, and I’m probably sending the wrong signals.

But some of this is also deliberate. Because I need to set expectations more than usual. Matching the game to the right group is always important, but with Intrigue, it’s extremely crucial. With someone not adjusted to its potential for brutal beats and backstabbing, and its need for nuanced negotiations, it can legitimately strain relationships.

When I play games, it’s within the “magic circle” of a game’s fictional environment. Nothing done there is done “to me” and nothing I do is done “to you.” It’s that separation I mentioned earlier, where you recognize that you’re getting to roleplay these actions without true consequence.

But not everyone has this type of perspective or maturity. An attack in-game is a personal attack on them. This isn’t hypothetical; I’ve seen this at the table.

So the ability to separate yourself from a game’s narrative is important here. It’s the difference between having a bad time and having an amazing one.

The rules are not difficult to absorb, at least. In a hallmark of many of my favorites, I can teach this in ~5 minutes, and only minor clarifications will be needed beyond that. The turn structure keeps everyone involved at multiple points, and what others do when you aren’t involved still affects you tangibly. Mechanically speaking, there’s a ton to like here.

But negotiation already limits the audience, because it’s inherently socially demanding. The “non-binding” part of deals also means that everyone is going to have to be ready for this.

To frame these things as bad is wrong, though. “Socially demanding” and “potentially brutal” are clarion calls to me in gaming. I actively want these descriptions to fit the games I’m playing.

The bad beats, including the ones you think favor another player too much or which leave you utterly gut-punched, are opportunities to laugh at the moment. Or to use it as a launch point for trades and deals with other players, as you point out the imbalance that’s just been created.

The strategy is largely human in nature, which even makes Intrigue a wonderful bonding experience…so long as it doesn’t inspire anger in those not properly attuned to its gameplay. I have no issue separating in-game actions from out-of-game relationships; to me, that’s part of the social contract of table games. But I’ve played games with others who will conflate the two, and so this style of gameplay becomes more dangerous. It may be synonymous with “good fun” to me, but I’m distinctly aware that this is not always the case.

Player-Driven, Petty, Glorious Garbage

The other thing this game is, is player-driven. Basically all of the tools to balance, or imbalance, the game exist in the players’ collective hands.

The moments this creates can be amusing. This is the only game I’ve played where the following legitimately worked:

“Why should I employ your scholar over hers?”
“Because I’m losing so badly. I’m obviously in last place. I have nothing. I can’t even offer you money if I hope to come back. Just…please employ my scholar. Pretty please?”

And it worked! No, I didn’t come back to win, but I think I managed a 2nd place finish, furiously charging back since I was off the radar of the rest of the table, who were all willing to work with me.

That interpersonal meta-game is the heart of the game in many respects. Yes, there are some tactics involving scholar deployment that can help, or the types of deals you create. I’ve had success, for example, in telling others to send a scholar to me at the end of their turn, in exchange for employing mine, implying that they’ll be employed similarly. Or pointing to an already-employed scholar in my estate, with a silent implication that their employment may soon be at an end unless they agree to my terms.

Usually I’m even telling the truth in such moments. Usually…

It’s both a wonder to me that this game exists with all of its nonsense, and also a wonder to me that it’s the only game I can think of that accurately models certain types of human interactions that we don’t see elsewhere in gaming. In part, at least, because I imagine many designers are afraid to explore such interactions.

Even other negotiation games don’t have the contradictions contained in Intrigue. Play at three players, for example, and you’ll need an extremely short memory, because you’ll be forced to work repeatedly with those who have horrifically screwed you over. At its max 5-player count, it’s possible to hold a grudge with one player for the entire game and still get by. But not in smaller sessions, simply because there are not enough options available to you to avoid betraying someone.

Many of its peers in the negotiation genre will have a single point of betrayal, at which point you try to leverage the situation into a win. Everyone knows it’s coming; it’s just a matter of when. But it’s not a constant maelstrom of such moments.

Which makes Intrigue fascinating, and seemingly out of place among modern game design that deemphasizes these sorts of conflicts and generally comes packaged with a lot more components and rules overhead to obfuscate any lingering nastiness that may exist.

Instead, it trusts players to navigate these things on their own. This isn’t just rare in board gaming, it’s almost unheard of.

Intrigue – Conclusions

I’ve attempted to paint a picture of Intrigue as one that is potentially amazing for the right group, but also more precarious on its perch of greatness than nearly any other game I could name. It’s eminently fragile in multiple ways, and could easily produce a horrible experience for tables just as readily as great ones.

My experiences with it have been good to spectacular, but that’s only because I’m curating those I play with carefully, and setting expectations clearly beforehand.

If you don’t believe this would work with your play group, it probably won’t. But if it would, it may just be worth tracking down a copy for the singular experience it provides.