It's a fun game, I own it and play it frequently. Main disadvantages:
- There are people who dislike lying, and/or social deduction games. This obviously won't work for them.
- Winner is often random, there's not a strong correlation between skill and final outcome.
- Frequent kingmaker dynamics, where one person can't win but can decide which of two other people will win.
- People who are out can be sitting on the side with nothing to do for a few minutes.
2
1Big fan of Coup. Agree with many things you say.
Some quick notes:
- There's not really a thing as "the pareto optimal game"
- Concretely, multiple social deception games are plausibly pareto optimal, at least compared to each other:
- Coup, Diplomacy, Avalon, Blood on the Clock-tower, and Poker are all strong candidates imo.
- In a high dimensional-space, being "pareto-optimal" is somewhat of a weak condition. Many ways to be pareto-optimal!
- The first expansion has some non-emergent team mechanics baked in into it by default. I like it less than the base game but I'm a purist.
- I think you're underrating the tempo and "predicting the future" angle to Coup.
- Imo a lot of the game is about positioning yourself in a way that means your opponents have to make choices where they either have to hand you the game at 85% probability, or hand to somebody else at 95% probability. So their optimal move is to go for winning at 15% probability as opposed to 5%.
- Since everybody's maximizing their own win probability (explicitly in the rules: there's no such thing as second place), if you do this well you can probabilistically force your own victory by ensuring other people are playing locally optimal moves.
- Tempo is an important subconcept as well. Much of the "gravity of coup" is figuring out when to go for tempo plays (where you are aiming to be a threat and thus positioning yourself to execute deadly moves) and going for anti-tempo plays (where you're aiming to be as little a threat as possible so your opponents are more incentivized to go after each other).
I also discuss some of the strategy here.
Nice! I've definitely not tried extremely hard to play optimally. Tempo + predicting the future feels like a very fun thing to figure out. Maybe it can be solved kind of game-theoretically? Though it seems very hard to do this well.
That article on the 'gravity of coup' is fantastic - it's true that IMO coup is at is best when it's at 3 players, mexican-standoff style. I think I've never had two 3-player games that felt similar.
My last link gives some ideas for how to think through the 3p version, though you might enjoy thinking it through yourself instead.
Excellently IMO :) the general dynamic is that the fewer players there are, the more important it is to be “playing the player not the game”. And the more players there are the more important basic fundamentals are
With 2 players it‘s pretty optimal to be trying to read the opponent a lot. So games can be very cutthroat.
You also get a lot of rounds in, so you can metagame more (eg you call the opponent’s bluff on turn 1 because they were clearly bluffing on turn 1 the last few rounds)
A few things I like about Coup are (1) you can learn to make a coalition, or multiple (Coup generally behaves like a zero-sum game, but with 3+ players, coalition is a smart thing to do), (2) analyze the coalition values and learn to break away from coalition when needed (this is not the same as backstabbing, since any temporary coalitions in Coup require players to eventually compete with each other).
One idea for the Team version is to have a general rule like “either member of the team survives, both teammates win” so people can learn to use the cards that are more valuable (I tend to notice that I win more games with a safe combination like “Duke + Ambassador/Captain”, or “Captain + Contessa”).
(Nit: Whenever a game is the best in some dimension, it's Pareto-optimal. You say that Coup is "the" Pareto-optimal game, but if the Pareto set just had one element, that element would be simply optimal (not merely Pareto-optimal)! Even more than that, probably a substantial fraction of social deduction game are Pareto optimal. Finding a particular pair of games where one dominated another would be surprising.)
1Base Coup is best at around three players. Past that it gets diluted: with a big table, the risk-reward of calling someone out collapses. Most of the time, do you really want to be the one to stick your neck out and challenge?
You can team up with others to challenge by randomizing. E.g. with 4 players, the other three can agree to randomize who should challenge, with a 1/3 chance each (or any other distribution; you can negotiate over this). The player who's then chosen by the randomization could still not go through; the rules don't oblige them to. But it's anti-cooperative and other players won't appreciate it and can punish you later.
Yeah seven is pushing it a bit. We change the rules to shuffle in the cards. The Ambassador is just nerfed until somebody dies and can see 2 cards
Oh, interesting. So every time someone loses influence, you put that card back in the stack in the middle?
Do you do that with fewer players too? That feels like it changes the endgame significantly with larger group sizes.
Good game, but definitely not Pareto optimal!
The team version is called Coup Reformation and is a big improvement for more players. The important added rule is:
- Every player has a loyalty to one of two faction (arbitrarily called Loyalists and Reformists, and indicated with a card in front of you facing up or down)
- You cannot attack a person from your own faction
- You may change your faction for 1 coin
- You may change someone else's faction for 2 coins
- Only if everyone is in the same faction does it revert to the Hobbesian all vs. all of the original
Dialog from coup games is more procedural: "I steal from Dan with my Captain". Dialog from Coup Reformation tends more theatrical "You dare attack the collective, you revisionist swine! The Empire shall make our revenge! <gets loyalty card flipped> My brother! I see now the error of my ways! Let us band together destroy the evil imperialists! ". Also more of the game is spent with everyone alive, instead of dead people waiting for the game to finish.
Other games I think are closer to the Pareto frontier:
- Cheese Thief
- An excellent social deduction game for a la Mafia or Avalon for 4-8 players. It's so easy to teach I often don't explain the rules and just narrate the first night
- Needs dice (d6), cups to hide the dice, cards to secretly assign a cheese thief, and a piece of pantomime cheese.
- Easier to teach than Coup and less friendship destroying
- Not as compact as Coup if you need to bring the cups?
- Werewords
- 20 questions "figure out the secret word" game, but with Werewolves trying to get the questions off-track and a Seer trying to help people guess the word while remaining hidden
- Can be played with a phone and improvised role assignment cards, no box necessary.
Other social deductive honorable mentions are Time Bomb: Undercover (mostly cooperative in a group, easier on new people to go with the flow), BloodBound (more complex game, less social deduction about who is lying and more logical deduction about who thinks who is on what team), Spaceteam (needs no materials but phones), and of course One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
Coup is a great game, but I'll caution that pure social games like this will often lead to mistrust outside of the game, and break social cohesion. When you see your friend is very adept at manipulation and backstabbing, it really makes you wonder where they learned it, and where they're applying it elsewhere.
I've been playing Coup for a long time now. I keep a copy in my backpack and bring it everywhere. It's definitely earned the space - I have an absolute blast every time I play this game, with new friends or old!
A few reasons it's so good:
I think everyone should strongly consider owning a copy!
The rules, briefly
Coup is a bluffing game. There are mechanics, but bluffing is the heart of it.
Mechanics. Everyone holds hidden cards. Your cards give you powers and also are your lives. Each player tries to gain resources and eliminate other players over the course of the game, and the last one standing wins.
Bluffing. The key move is that you can claim to be a character you don't actually have, which lets you take powerful actions. But it's a risk-reward trade: anyone can challenge your claim. If you were bluffing and they call it correctly, you lose a life. If they call wrong, you keep your life and they lose one instead.
The bluffing is what makes it really fun! Calling a bluff — or bluffing in the first place — is high-stakes. And on top of the base mechanics (which I think are genuinely well designed) there's a whole emergent layer of mind games and metagaming that makes it far more fun.
This doesn't really do it justice though. You can get a taste of what it's like by watching this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wIE50edV3bk
Where it falls short, and a fix I'm exploring
Base Coup is best at around three players. Past that it gets diluted: with a big table, the risk-reward of calling someone out collapses. Most of the time, do you really want to be the one to stick your neck out and challenge? With three people that tension is balanced perfectly; with six or seven it mostly drains away.
So I've been thinking about a team version. Pair up with a partner, and six people play as three teams of two (or two teams of three) instead of a diffuse six-way. I think that'd keep the risk-reward tight while accommodating more people. I'll probably grab a second set to try it out.
Bottom line
Coup is just a straightforwardly good game to own. I've introduced it to several friend groups, they've gone and bought their own copies, and they love it. More people should have one.