Dune Betrayal Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Dune Betrayal, a social deduction board game published by Gale Force 9. Designed by the same designer as the Resistance, Dune Betrayal has players trying to figure out who is an enemy and who is an ally.

The story of Dune takes place in the far future. 2025 or something. By this time, Kickstarter is the only place to buy board games. Everything is KS exclusive and campaigns last one minute and thirty seconds. Microtransactions have been jammed into board gaming and are now the norm. Not surprisingly, all games are Dune-themed. It’s been this way since 2020.

Dune Betrayal is a hidden role, a social deduction game for four to eight players. Games last between twenty and forty minutes, depending on player count.

In Dune Betrayal, each player is given a hidden identity which either puts them in House Atreides or Harkonnen. Depending on player count, each house will include one or more fighters and one or more nobles. Based on their identity, players will take two trait cards and place them face down in front of them. When combined, these trait cards reveal that a player is either a fighter for one of the two houses or that they are a noble for either house. Nobles are especially important because they have the potential to lose the most points when targeted. Scoring works in a tug-of-war fashion which I will explain later.

Over the course of three action rounds, players will attempt to gain information about the identities of other players, then the last two rounds (targeting rounds) are used to play attack/defend cards onto other players.

During the action rounds, in clockwise order starting with the dealer, each player will draft one of the available face-up action cards. These cards either have immediate