Sheriff of Nottingham

Just look at him... like goddamn Mortarion

Sheriff of Nottingham is a game based around lying, bribery, and deception. The game for That Guy and for those who prefer ruining their friendships through other means besides MarioKart and Munchkin.

How to Play

The premise and rules for Sheriff of Nottingham are fairly simple: sell and smuggle as many goods as you can into the market and make bank. You have your normal goods, represented in green cards. These are typically bread, cheese, apples, and chickens. Then you have your contraband listed on red cards, like silk or pepper. And finally you have Royal goods, which count as contraband but at the end of the game count as multiples of a certain item, like x2 cheeses or x2 apples (we'll get to that). Both contraband and Royal goods are worth more than twice the price of normal goods, but if you get caught with them you have to pay the sheriff more than a normal good. Each merchant has a stand, where he keeps his goods that he brought into the market, or any contraband that he managed to smuggle.

Each round, a single merchant becomes the sweaty fat fuck known as the sheriff. His job is to make sure no one gets contraband into the market... though depending on who is the sheriff at the time, he can do a really shitty job.

To put it simply, each round of the game has five phases:

1. Market: Draw up to a maximum of six cards in your hand from the deck. You can choose to pick from the discard pile if there is one, but whoever is the sheriff at the time can see what you draw.
2. Load your merchant bags: Each merchant has a little merchant bag to put their goods in. It's at this point you choose whether to go clean (have only one type of legal good in your bag) or dirty like a bad, bad girl (hiding contraband or Royal goods.) Cannot choose to put zero cards in it, but can't put in more than five either. Once you've decided on your items, you put them in and button it shut. No tampering with it now.
3. Declare your items: For this phase, whether you have contraband or different cards or not, you have to declare the exact number or cards in your bad and declare one type of normal good in the bag. EX. I put one cheese, an apple, and a crack cocaine pepper in my merchant bag. Since I have to declare a single type of normal good in my bag, I say "I have three cheeses in my bag" (for whatever reason, you're not allowed to have multiple types of goods even if none of them are contraband), or something of that nature.
4. Sheriff: This is the phase that can make or break the game and/or friendships. The sheriff questions each person about the items in their bag and they negotiate and bluff. The merchant can keep with his story on what items he had, or he can bribe the sheriff with money or items in his merchant cart. He can also promise the one playing the Sheriff future out-of-game favors. Nothing is out of the question when it comes to the bribery here. Of course, the sheriff could choose to search your bag. One of two things will happen if it comes to that: he can see that you weren't lying, and that you actually DID have 4 chickens in your bag. He has to pay you, out of his own money, the penalty price for each item in the bag. Then there's the other option; he finds your contraband, or for whatever reason you don't have a single type of item in your bag. Then YOU have to pay the penalty price on the items. You keep any of your legal goods that were in the bag, but contraband or Royal goods are put in the discard pile. You could potentially goad the sheriff of checking your bag full of perfectly legal cheese, call rape like a tumblr feminist, and get him to pay up.
5. Round ends: For all the goods you brought into the market, you earn the selling price that is listed on the items. Legal goods range from 2-4 gold, but contraband can range from 7-10 gold. You then place the legal goods face up in their listed spots on the merchant cart. If you were able to smuggle contraband in, place it upside down in its respective place on your cart without telling the sheriff what it was. The role of sheriff rotates to the next person, and the round begins anew.

At the end of the game, you count the total amount of gold you have and the number of normal goods you have. This where Royal goods come in, as they add to that amount. If you have the most or second most of a good, you get certain bonuses based on them. There's some multiplying, dividing and rounding down shit, but in short: the more you have, the better.

TL;DR

The best game for telling which one of your friends lies the best, bluffs the worst, and how far will you go to smuggle that fucking crossbow in.

See Also

• Cards Against Humanity

• That Guy

• Shadow Hunters

• Luke

Gallery

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  Gold number is selling price, red number is penalty value.