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Game Preview: 8 The Liar, or I Am the One in Ten Even Though I Don't Exist

Game Preview: 8 The Liar, or I Am the One in Ten Even Though I Don't Exist
Board Game: 8 the Liar
I mentioned in my preview of See-Know-Buzz that "bluffing seems to play a core role in a larger percentage of games from Japanese designers", but to some degree I think that's because I tend to play more games with few components from Japanese designers than I do from non-Japanese designers — and when you have relatively few components in a game, bluffing becomes a game mechanism that sort of introduces more components into the gameplay, if you get what I'm saying. You're not playing against an opponent whose pieces and actions are all visible to you, but against someone who has multiple possible actions going on within the cloud and you're trying to play against as many of them as possible before the wave function collapses and you see what's really going on.

Now I might be overthinking the concept of bluffing as a game mechanism, but that's just what bluffing wants me to do, right?

Which leads us to Odd Hackwelder's 8 The Liar from Swan Panasia and his Hacko Games. While this game has more components than a microgame — 72 cards(!) along with some chips and player cards — the game itself plays out like a microgame, with everyone bluffing and bluffing again (or not) while trying to shed cards and chips.

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