Sheriff Of Nottingham provides a serviceable bluffing experience that sadly fails to excite beyond its initial shallow thrill, which is a real shame because a game about border smuggling has instant classic written all over it. It’s a perfectly functional design insofar as none of its flaws are catastrophic or complete deal-breakers, but most of what the game actually is fails to take advantage of its exciting premise in any meaningful way. Its overall structure and cadence are routine and uninspired and claiming victory amounts to little more than boring set collection. For these reasons, Sheriff Of Nottingham operates in a strange middle-ground between tension and vacuity, struggling to be anything more than uniquely mediocre. Its momentary action can feel quite impactful at times and yet the total package feels dull. Maybe those seeking only a few solid “Gotcha!” moments will find this a fulfilling way to spend an hour or so, but asking for anything more memorable or flavorful than that will likely be answered by disappointment.
In Sheriff Of Nottingham, players take turns acting as the titular officer while the others embody merchants attempting to bring goods of all kinds through the city gates to sell at their stands. In the center of the table is a massive face-down draw deck of “Goods Cards” and two face-up discard piles. Goods cards come in two forms: legal and contraband. Legal goods may be declared truthfully at the gates, but the only way to make any money off that sweet, sweet contraband is to lie about it. Each round, the merchant players take turns setting aside, drawing, and discarding cards from their hands of six. They may draw either from the deck or the discard piles, though attentive opponents will know exactly what cards they are adding to their hands if they choose the latter. After this, they each load a cloth bag with 1-5 goods, clasp it shut (these clasps are a crucial aspect of the game’s component design which we’ll be getting to in just a moment), and hand it over to the sheriff, declaring that the bag contains an exact amount of a single legal good as they do. Keep in mind, merchants are permitted to lie about the contents of their bag, but not the amount of cards inside it. In other words, “5 chickens” may actually be “1 chicken and 4 dangerous and illegal weapons”, but the numbers must add up.
Then comes the inspection, the game’s dirty, rotten, no-good heart. The sheriff gathers the merchant’s bags together, staring their owners in the eyes one-by-one and gently grazing the bags’ flaps with the back of his index finger to see who sweats. You see, it is the sheriff’s duty to determine who is telling the truth about their goods and who is full of it. Any bag he gives back to the owner unopened is emptied inviolate into their merchant stand, but the bags he does choose to inspect result in consequences potentially much greater. This is where the all-important clasp on the cloth bags comes in, because Sheriff Of Nottingham‘s entire essence — its raison d’être — is based in the resonant, punctuating “Pop!” of it coming undone. It is the sound of finality, of a decision that can not be unmade, of simultaneous victory and defeat. When the sheriff opens a merchant’s bag 1 of 2 things happens: either a) they were lying about its contents and must pay a penalty to the sheriff for each of the goods that were not truthfully declared, which are then discarded; or b) they were telling the truth, and the sheriff must instead pay a penalty to the merchant he unfairly harassed. To further spice up these proceedings, merchants are openly encouraged to offer bribes to the sheriff in the form of gold, goods, and future favors to allow them to pass, thus creating a complicated cost-benefit proposition for the would-be inspector. Sure, a bribe of 5 gold might sound great, but what if accepting it ends up earning the merchant 5 times that? Even more, you can’t forget about the possibility of the classic double bluff; they could just be pretending to want to bribe you so you’ll open their bag to spite them and have to pay an exorbitant penalty. Bah, being the sheriff is hard!
Regardless of what happens, the game ends after each player acts as the sheriff a set number of times. Everyone counts up the monetary value of the goods in their merchant stands, bonuses are paid out to merchants that have the most or second most of any particular kind of legal good, and whoever is the richest is declared the winner. A notable element of scoring is that the goods bonuses are rather large, in my experience often determining the winner. This places an emphasis on the game’s set collection aspect, which isn’t great because Sheriff Of Nottingham‘s set collection aspect is completely braindead. Try to get the most of one or two types of goods; that’s it. That’s all the strategy there is to it. If a discard pile is full of cheese and you have a good chance to take the lead in cheese you should take it, end of consideration. The only way for bluffing to even help you out with this is if you happen to come across a “Royal Good” — contraband that contributes to the tally of one of your legal goods — but you have absolutely no control over which royal goods (or regular goods for that matter) that you end up having access to. Not offering enough player choice when it comes to what goods are attempted to be brought through the gates limits the game’s potential for emotional investment. Imagine if in Skull the coasters you laid down were drawn randomly from a stack so you didn’t have full control over when your skull was played. It’s one thing to call (or get caught in) a bluff where the circumstances are entirely player created, and another, much lesser thing when what you’re bluffing over is several degrees more arbitrary.
Other areas Sheriff Of Nottingham struggles in are its flat player dynamic and lack of narrative. Every round feels the same — unless it’s your turn as sheriff — and none of them build on each other. The inconsistent player roles effectively kill any chance the game has for a satisfying or engaging dramatic arc. How limited of an experience would something like Fury Of Dracula be if players had to take turns acting as the count? This is the perfect thematic set up for asymmetric winning conditions or a 1vAll approach or something more creative than “the players take turns acting as the sheriff,” but the opportunity simply is not taken. Its frustrating that a game so obviously built for boisterous game nights full of mischief and revelry plays it so close to the chest in many regards.
Sheriff Of Nottingham fails to create a sufficient environment of suspicion or intrigue due to the limitations it places on things like narrative and player intent. It’s better than Coup, which practically doesn’t even have an environment, but it still mostly comes across as hollow “Hey man, are you lying?” guesswork. It has its moments — almost always due to clever players attempting ridiculous bribes that either succeed or fail spectacularly — and yet it’s hard to be truly enthusiastic about a game in which the most exciting moment is a sound one of its components makes. The goods that Sheriff Of Nottingham brings to the table may be functional and fine, but it seems to me that it would take another authority altogether to embroider them with the proper amount of flair and drama to make them truly “Pop!”
Sheriff Of Nottingham gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.