Infiltraitors

• Designer: John Kean and Liam Kean
• Publisher: Broadway Toys Limited
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20-30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Your organization has been infiltrated by moles – nefarious informants from the enemy. As faithful agents, you must work together to uncover and eliminate all the traitors. Infiltraitors is a challenging deduction card game with 20 missions. Suspect cards are set aside at the start – these are the traitors that must be identified by suit and numbers. Players must manage their hands to give clues on the suspect cards. Clues may match with a traitor by having the same suit or where the number is either a multiple or a factor of the traitor’s. As the clues accumulate, players may deduce the identity of a traitor card, but can you catch them all before the time runs out?

Infiltraitors has a booklet of 20 scenarios, and the rules recommend that you play through them in serial fashion.  To play a scenario, open up the booklet to the one you want to play, and it will tell you how to construct your deck, the size of each player’s starting hand, how many suspects need to be caught this round and how many bullets you have to catch them with.  

On a turn, the active player takes a single action from the following 5 possibilities:

1] Nab a Suspect – take one of the suspect cards from the center of the table and place it in your card stand so that only you can see it.  Your job is to get one of your playing partners to correctly identify your card.  You may only have one suspect at a time.  When you do this, discard 1 card from the deck face down.

2] Give a Clue – if you have a suspect in front of you, play a card from your hand to help your partners. Play it vertically if it matches the color of your suspect or relates to the number – a card is related if it is either a multiple or a factor of the number.  Play it horizontally if it does not match the color nor relate to the number of your suspect.  Conveniently, the cards have a little stripe on them telling you which numbers relate to them.

3] Information exchange – play a card in front of another player’s suspect, they orient the card to tell you whether or not your card matches color/number or not using the same rules as above

4] Bide Your Time – discard the top card of the deck, and then draw up to 3 cards into your hand. There is a hard limit of 7 cards in your hand.

5] Eliminate a Traitor – if you think you can identify one of the other Suspect cards, discard a bullet, point the paper gun at a Suspect and declare its identity.  If you are right, the Suspect gets shuffled back into the deck and then all its clues are discarded face up.  As a bonus, you can take a card from the discard pile into your hand, even if it is a face down card.  If you are wrong, the bullet is lost and your turn is over.

The game is lost if all the cards in the deck and in the player hands are used up OR if you have fewer Bullets left than the number of remaining suspects.    The game is won by the group if all the suspects are identified before any of the loss conditions are met.

My thoughts on the game

There have been a number of deduction games from Spiel 2023, and they all bring something a little different to the table.  Here, it’s a cooperative game, and you’re trying to figure out the identity of a number of unknown cards.  The clue system is pretty neat – with the cards being played and then a yes/no answer given on whether they are related or not.

Depending on the level of cooperation and communication the group decides on, this can be a cooperative/possibly quarterbacked process in one extreme or one where each player is forced to individually deduce on their own.  There are little memo boards which can be used to help – it seems easy enough to mark off the information deduced from each clue card.  If nothing else, it prevents people from having to recalculate things as each of their turns comes up.  This worked fine for us, and it seemed more like a timesaver than anything else.

The cards are well designed, and I like the fact that each card has the reminder stripe on it telling you which numbers are related to it.  It helps keep the possibility of human error to a minimum – and of course, that is the bane of any deduction game…  Any error made in a clue answer can throw off everyone’s thought process.

The initial rounds are pretty easy, but the difficulty definitely ramps up as you move through the scenario book.  One thing that I have learned is that it can be crucial to get things done in the right order – especially when it comes to solving a card.  What I didn’t realize at first is that your choice of card from the discard pile can be crucial.  And, there are times where – even though you know the identity of one of the suspect cards – you might want to wait and ask a question with a particular card so that it’s available to be taken out of the discards to be used on another suspect.  

Later missions will add in more rules.  Such as, having to solve the suspect cards in the order that you nab them.  Or you can only solve a suspect card if it has the same number of horizontal cards as vertical cards next to it.  Or a liimtation where a player can only solve the suspect card directly to the left of him.  As you can see, all of these rules change it up a little bit, but the basic idea of the game remains the same.

You don’t have to be super efficient when you start the game, but as the number of suspects increases, you’ll really want to ask the minimum number of questions possible per suspect or else the deck runs out on you!  And, some scenarios really cause you to play lots of cards – especially the ones that need you to balance vertical and horizontal cards.

The components are well done.  The cards have held up well in our first few plays, and the colors are easily distinguishable.  The wooden stands that hold up the suspect cards have a groove that is slightly wide, so make sure that your suspect card always tilts towards you.  The cardboard gun points well, and especially when Ryan holds it, makes a loud “Bang!” exclamation each time it is pointed at a suspect.

If you like deduction games, this one seems to work well. Games tend to be short, and you can alter the difficulty level by changing how much you are allowed to discuss and collaborate.  Like many of these games, I think your interest will boil down to how much you like to play logic puzzles as a game and/or in a group.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Jonathan F.: I’ve played Infiltraitors once and we had a good play. Some cards, like the 2 & 3 are useful for eliminating lots of options with one card. Others, like the 11 & 13 are highly situational, but you cannot burn them casually, as so few card come back into your hand after they are played. Some of the missions turn it in into a memory game and we skipped those. After thinking on it and planning to comment here, don’t get it for the ‘missions’, but do get it if you like hyper-efficiency and high challenge, such as getting 11 suspects with 12 bullets before the deck runs out. 

Things I don’t like about the game – First, the gun/bullets/theme are pretty thin and I don’t love pointing even cardboard guns at other people, even in Cash ‘n’ Guns, Second, the game is about the variability of the card draw, but most of the aha moments about the game’s design come in the first game and then are natural parts of the game, such as how I can think a guess is 50/50 while you know for sure who it is. 

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor