Played
MANTIS FALLS
It's high time to leave town
Designer: Adrian Kerrihard | Publisher: Distant Rabbit Games
In Mantis Falls you are the witness to a crime in a small town in 1940s America. Your task? To make it across the sunset-shaded suburbs, without getting bumped off by the mob.
This is a card-based hidden-role survival game for 2-3 players. One of you may be, secretly, an assassin, who wins if they survive and a witness dies. Clearly, in a 2-player game, if there were always an assassin, the social deduction element would be insultingly easy – if you had a witness card, you’d automatically know the other player was an assassin. The workaround, in common with higher player count survival games like Dead of Winter, has you draw your secret roles from a pool one larger than the number of players: 2 witnesses and 1 assassin in a 2-player game, 3 witnesses and 1 assassin in a 3-player game. This means there is always the possibility that no one is conspiring to kill you, but – unless you’re the assassin yourself – there’s always grounds for suspicion.