I’m currently living in Australia. Australia is a resource-rich country, with all kinds of pretty shiny minerals just lying around under the surface – which is kind of ironic seeing as it was initially colonised by people who were sent here as a punishment for taking too much interest in valuable things. It’s almost as if God shaped the country purely out of precious metals, covered it with a thin layer of red dust and poisonous creatures and said “That’ll do”. Australia has had a mining boom, raking in tonnes of cash as well as fundamentally contributing to China’s ability to take over the world. However, although they’re finding all sorts of natural metals to mine, Australia has yet to begin pulling Board Games out of the ground. This is the only reason I can think of as to why it’s such an expensive hobby over here in the south Pacific. In Australia, you either have the choice of ordering from the US and paying inflated shipping prices, or you can order locally and pay high market prices as well as inflated shipping prices. I find it strange that gaming is such a hard hobby to fund here, seeing as only two hundred years ago a bunch of White Europeans used the entire continent to play a Live-Action Settlers of Catan game.

This unnecessarily verbose introduction is to explain why I bought Saboteur in the first place. It was cheap (by Aussie standards). I was placing an order online and spotted a game that would take my package just over the “FREE SHIPPING!!!!” limit without forcing me to spend another week’s wages. Saboteur. Here’s a word for you. ‘Cheapskate’. And here’s another word for you. ‘Serendipity’.

You see, I wasn’t expecting much from Saboteur. It was a filler game after all, and sometimes suggesting to my gaming group that we play a new, lightweight card game draws the same kind of awkward silence and I-refuse-to-make-eye-contact looks that you get when you suggest that we make a pact to kill each other’s grandparents. It’s been nearly three months and I still haven’t convinced them to play Condottiere. But for some reason, one day, someone else suggested we give the game with the Dwarfs a go. So we did. And Saboteur has pretty much been the only regular feature of our gaming group for the past couple of months.

There are several reasons why this is the case. Firstly, it’s a short game. Usually, we reach the end of the evening and we’re in that “Probably too early to go home, probably too late to start a new game of Puerto Rico” zone. Saboteur is a fine filler game. Even when you’re teaching a whole bunch of new people, you can get through the required three rounds in half-an-hour without breaking a sweat.

Secondly, it can take up to ten players. This is a big bonus. Sometimes five of us show up to play, sometimes nine. When it’s six or more, we usually have to break up into two groups. It’s nice to actually be able to play a game all together, instead of just jealously eyeing the other group’s game of Colosseum from across the table where you’re playing a rather dull round of Settlers. What’s more, although you can start a game with eight players there’s no reason why players can’t drop out between rounds. You just remove one of the Dwarf/Saboteur cards, check that you’re still drawing the same number for your hand and carry on as if the player who has just left never existed. Which they don’t. I mean, what sort of cretin leaves in the middle of a game anyway?

Thirdly, and this is the best one, it generates lots of table talk. As much as I love Oasis, for example, there’s only so much humorous banter you can bring into a game about laying tiles and camels on a desert. Seriously, it’s really hard. If anyone’s got any amusing comments I can use during that game (or Through the Desert) I’d really appreciate it. Saboteur, on t’other hand, is a different kettle of fish. It’s easy. The game is all about the psychology – to the extent that trash talk is pretty much compulsory. Don’t let the simple rules and the “youngest player goes first” mechanic make you think that this is a game for kids. This is a game for Hannibal Lector. Accusations and counter-accusations fly. There’s nothing more satisfying than being the lone Saboteur and watching true Dwarfs engage in tit-for-tat tool breaking with one another while your cunning master plan comes to fruition. It’s all about the bluffing and the misdirection. As such, it’s fun and social. It’s the sort of game that I would be very confident about bringing out amongst a group of non-gamers. There’s not much more that you can ask for a game that is, when you get down to it, cheap.

It’s not perfect. There’s at least one member of our group who rolls his eyes and sighs when the crowd hollers for Saboteur (though I think he might come round if I tell him that he should treat the gold nuggets as though they were Victory Points), and the game can suffer from balance issues depending on the number of Saboteurs at around the five/six player mark. But if I wanted a perfectly balanced game, I’d play chess. I want a game that lets me peer over my hand at seven other people, wondering which of them is the enemy. I want a game that lets me call people liars in a loud yet socially-acceptable manner. I want a game that costs me not very much money indeed. Saboteur is that game.