Base price: $20.
2 – 5 players. Two player variant.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: ~2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Inside Job was provided by KOSMOS.
I’m doing that thing I sometimes do where before I go out of town I hurriedly try to write a few reviews just in case I get back to town and I’m super sick or I’m tired or I’m jetlagged even though this trip is mostly a short jaunt and it should be great for my mental health. Maybe, dare I say, an Actual Vacation? Perish the thought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But in the meantime, I’ve got some thoughts on the latest KOSMOS title, Inside Job!
In Inside Job, players are secret agents trying to accomplish missions by trick-taking. However, not everyone’s on the same team! One player among you is an Insider, passing notes to the enemy and leaking secrets that could harm your organization. And you can’t have that! Flushing them out is going to be harder than it looks, though. You’ll need to use your deduction skills and trick them into making a mistake or make it so difficult for them to work against you that you complete your mission anyways. Can you root out the double agent?
Overall: 6 / 10
Alright, I know you’re looking at the 6 / 10 and thinking “wow, Eric didn’t love that game” or something equivalent. And it’s true, Inside Job wasn’t my favorite game I’ve played in a little while and I don’t particularly want to play it again, and I don’t think that, fundamentally, more plays are going to change my mind. So rather than assume that I just hated it (which, I didn’t), why don’t you let me tell you why I think it’s a well-designed and smart game?
Let’s do the quick lead-in. Hi, my name’s Eric, and I don’t particularly care for social deduction games. It’s just how I work. If there’s a component of the game that requires you to explicitly tell someone “I’m not the traitor” and they then have to choose to believe you or not, it’s usually not going to land well for me unless it’s expertly woven into other mechanics (for instance, I enjoyed Project Winter because even though it has some elements of a hidden traitor, I just like crafting). I have yet to see a board game accomplish that feat, however, so I’m not going to hold Inside Job to an as-of-yet impossible standard. Not my scene. Inside Job is fundamentally a semi-cooperative trick-taking game with a hidden “traitor”, so, naturally, it’s unsurprising that even after one play, I know that it’s not going to land for me. If that’s what you came here for, you got it. Our play was particularly pathological, unfortunately, since it had a player accuse another player of being the traitor and they had a preexisting relationship that fed that decision and skewed the outcome. Alas. I don’t think Inside Job managed to suddenly change my mind on this type of game, so, here we are.
Now for the more interesting side of the review: here’s where I tell you why I think Inside Job is an impeccably smart and well-designed game that I wish I had liked. If you’re interested in social deduction at all or if you are one of those people who would have loved The Crew if it weren’t cooperative, you’re going to love this game. I had been a bit skeptical when I first heard of it, wondering why The Crew needed a hidden traitor, but there’s a surprising amount of depth and tension to it. To start, the game does a pretty rock-solid job of obfuscating who the traitor is by doing something interesting. Each trick has a Mission where, if the mission is successfully completed, the “good guys” (Agents) get closer to winning. The winner of the trick gains an intel token, which once they have enough, they must reveal their role and if they are the “bad guy” (Insider), they win. Since the start player chooses one of two cards to be the Mission, the Insider can potentially choose harder-to-complete Missions and throw players off their scent, which is always entertaining. The Insider also is allowed to play whatever cards they want, rather than following suit, so they can bluff and lie and cheat a little bit. It’s honestly very smart. I particularly like both the wealth of additional rules and roles and some of the variant rules that give players who don’t want to be the Insider one of the special roles that reveals itself at the start of the game so that they don’t have to potentially lie. It’s a great elevation of the social deduction genre, even if it’s still not a game I particularly enjoyed. That said, I’d rather play this a dozen times than many of the other social deduction games out there. If you’re a big fan of trick-taking, you love social deduction, or you just want to play an interesting, smart, and well-designed game, I’d definitely recommend checking out Inside Job! It’s a very cool concept; I’m just not a big social deduction person.
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