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I found Subterfuge to be a strange and sometimes uncomfortable game to play with friends. We've already talked about that a little, but perhaps we didn't talk enough about why it was able to have such an impact in the first place. Subterfuge is, more than anything else, a game of mutual deception, in which a group of players must work together whilst deftly avoiding the awkward truth that only one of them can emerge victorious.Now that's a wonderful concept, but it's not unique to Subterfuge: board games have been playing around with the idea since the birth of Diplomacy in the late '50s, and there's an even clearer inspiration to be found with browser-based, actual video game, Neptune's Pride. Just like the latter, a full game of Subterfuge is going to take you days to complete and this added time investment plays a huge role in ensuring that you can't really help but care about the game's outcome by the end. It's quite a bit more difficult to laugh off a last minute betrayal when you've been nurturing that relationship for more than a week.
But as I've already said, Neptune's Pride did all of this first. What makes Subterfuge one of the unsung games of 2015 then? At first glance the two games do look very similar - they both involve capturing territory with very slow moving fleets (spaceships and submarines don't look so different when represented as numbers). But whereas Neptune's Pride tasks its players with controlling more than half of the map to be declared the winner, Subterfuge offers a couple of different routes to victory. You can take the more traditional military path and look to capture the leaders of your opposition, or you can mine for Neptunium. I still can't quite believe that's the real name of a real chemical element, but there we are.
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