Human Era
is a new social deduction game by Zach and Jake Given.
I backed the Kickstarter last November, and it arrived at the end
of August, only about a month behind the original schedule.
The materials for play are a custom six-sided die, a time era display,
and many cards; it could easily have been fit into a shallower box,
and I may end up re-boxing it for portability.
Humans invented time travel, and the universe started to fall apart.
Fortunately, the future machine civilisation will put everything
right! But those pesky humans insist on putting their trivial
priorities, like "survival", ahead of the really important goals.
Gameplay consists of trying to return people, and animals, from
various eras of time to their original periods (go to period, choose a
team to do the job, vote on that team, then when a team's accepted get
them to perform the job); but some players will be machines, who want
to subvert this mission and bring on the rise of the superior beings,
and some are cyborgs, who can share a win with the machines by tipping
the game towards them, or go for a solo win later on. Only one copy of
each of the six beings can be visible at a time; if there are more,
that's a paradox, and the older one vanishes, revealing another
As with Homeland, another "second-generation" social deduction game
(with The Resistance and its kin being first generation in this
model, and Werewolf/Mafia being zeroth), play gets away from the
basic "find the traitor" model by giving the third player role a
reason to play for either side at various points during the game. Also
as with Homeland there's an extra card added to each mission to make
it harder to assign blame when things go wrong.
I need to get the rules properly lodged in my mind before I start
explaining it to other people, but it's a short (20-30 minute) game
that I'll certainly try out with the local group. Core gameplay
supports 4-8, 9-10 with slight modifications (in effect playing two
games at once with joint scoring); and there's a solo variant, playing
a harder version of the core "get cards into their right places"
mechanic without the treachery angle – suggesting the designers have
some confidence in this part of the gameplay.
The rules are reasonably clear though not perfect, and I look forward
to getting this to the table.
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