Overview & How to Play

“Me? Lie? Never!”

Sheriff of Nottingham has players taking turns either being the Sheriff of Nottingham himself, or honestly dishonest merchants wheeling their goods to market.

The goal is to have the most money at the end of the game, which is denoted by cards you take to market, as well as liquid cash. But to get the cards to market, you must first stuff them into bags, then go past the local Sheriff, who may or may not check your bag. Some extra bribery there is encouraged to strike deals, maybe the sheriff will agree to not open your bag if you pay him enough.

Every turn, you just draw cards, load up cards into felt bags, close the bags up, and then hand them over to the Sheriff of Nottingham for inspection. You can only declare that your bag has only 1 type of good, and its quantity, like announcing “I have 3 chickens! (nods) My good sir.”

Of course, the Sheriff doesn’t know if you’re telling the truth, and can pop open the bag. If there’s anything that is NOT chickens, like illegal crossbows, the merchant must pay the sheriff the value of each of those crossbows. But if the merchant was not lying, the Sheriff has to pay the merchant the value of all the innocent goods.

After the end of every round, the role of Sheriff passes to the left, and once everyone has played the role of Sheriff twice, the game immediately ends. Count your money to see who has swindled the best!

Pros

A big, WOW for this game is the velvet bags. They have buttons that make a loud click when closing or opening, helping make the act of checking someone’s bag clear. This sound is actually incorporated into gameplay, where once that CLICK is heard, the Sheriff is locked into the decision to check the bag.

Other quality of life stuff is great, with big player boards, bright medieval art, and even an insert. There’s a neat ‘facedown’ location for smuggled goods on your player boards. There’s a fantastic table of all the quantities of certain amounts if your group wants to game this more.

Jumping into gameplay, Sheriff of Nottingham really lends itself into not being seriously gamed because of the ridiculously fun opportunities to pitch your goods every turn. This turn on turn pitching will be great for actors and salesmen, where role-playing is highly encouraged, but not necessary for enjoyment. This gets compounded onto ways to stack your bag, with loading up your bag with partial lies (maybe some Pepper snuck in), or complete lies (4 Crossbows!). Does this affect your face when you’re lying?

You can even play the game by almost never lying, or by trying to convince the Sheriff to check your bag, since reckless checking by Sheriffs will cause them to pay players money. It’s really this dynamic of lying, then not lying, then lying again. Or were you? Only way to check, is by opening that bag. -CLICK- goes the bag, then hilarity ensues.

Sheriff of Nottingham also tackles the aspects of contraband surprisingly well, with contraband being permanently hidden until the end game, keeping scoring exciting and reasonably unpredictable. Plus, lots of the contraband cards are Royal Goods, which are special abilities which are always fun to play with.

Cons

The economy of cards flows well too. Players can discard cards into two discard piles face-up, and then others can draw from those discards! This lends to situations where you can get the exact cards you want, but then everyone else will know what’s in your hand as well.

However, this game can get a little same-y, with fairly weak pacing. Sheriff takes about an hour, with everyone playing the role of Sheriff twice, which can feel a bit like Deja-vu come late game. The game just starts to lose steam in the second round where the Sheriff inspections seem a little too mundane, and role-playing suffers as a result. We would have wanted a way to spice up the rotations, like introducing seasons into the game.

We also found that smuggling contraband was underpowered, since getting caught with it is too punishing compared to its actual reward. Plus, the de-facto strategy just became to primarily play innocent, which hurts the mischief element of the game. This can be solved by granting end-game bonuses to contraband goods.