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Product Image for Santaspotters
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Faction: Gamiverses · Type: Digital · Price: €14.95 (excl tax) · Same Spell As: Minimas Escape · Bauble Ball · Santaspotters · Christmas Prompt Cards

Santaspotters

It’s the same ever year, Santa said Some kids try to stay awake and spot him in the act! In this hidden role game, it’s Santa you try to find Was your friend Team Nice, or Team Naughty this whole time?

Santaspotters is a tense, social, funny, Christmas party game about hidden cards and secret identities.

All the players will pretend to be innocent children who sometimes wake up and try to spot Santa in their room.

In reality, everyone has a secret role that makes them either Team Nice or Team Naughty.

  • Team Naughty tries to figure out who Santa is. They win if guessed correctly.
  • Team Nice tries to help Santa. They win if Santa managed to get all the right “Santa cards” in their hand.

The tricky balancing act here, of course, is that you want to help Santa while keeping up the pretense that you might be him. The majority of players is always Nice … but they don’t know who to trust or where to send their gifts! Spot Santa too well and Krampus will spot him too, snatching victory.

This Christmas-themed game is great for large groups. Each added player only requires 1 more Role Card and 5 more Play Cards. It’s about figuring out hidden roles in teams, so players can lean on others if they missed rules or don’t understand something. In fact, honest forgetfulness is the greatest pokerface and misdirection in the world ;) Because you vote whether the game ends, play time is controlled and it allows taking breaks. If, say, people want to stretch their legs … or worry about their food burning in the kitchen.

The base game only has a few simple roles and two main rules (“gift a secret card on your turn” + “vote if you want the game to end”). You can explain this in 5 minutes and get started. You can even play with young kids / pre-readers. Once familiar with that, you can add the expansions (including the chaotic Neutral Roles), though some add cards with text that players regularly need to read.

More advanced roles, should you choose to include them, have abilities and restrictions that shake things up. The actual game is played through special cards with actions to help your investigation—or give you away to Krampus. Because every role gets a “personal deck”—exact cards that only you start with—you can’t get (un)lucky and ruin the game before it starts. But you need to be careful about who you trust to see those specific cards …

Have fun!

REMARK! This is a social game. To get the most out of it, players will need to talk, ask questions, try to decipher if someone is lying, and so forth. Especially the base game is so simple that it relies a lot on this aspect; the expansions add a lot more strategy and actions to get information in other ways. If you think your playing group won’t match well with such a game, we recommend checking out our other (Christmas) games!

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Product Contents

Below is a summary of this product's contents. The actual product might have even more inside, but never less.

  • Rules PDF (4 pages; 1 front page, 1 base game, 1 expansions, 1 role overview)
  • Material PDFs (24 role cards, 70 play cards, 12 sleepy clocks)
  • Original/Source Files (.af files that you can open and edit in the free Affinity software!)