The Infinitely-Changing Hidden-Role Game
Up to eight players at your table. Nineteen reimagined Shakespearean characters with their own hidden objectives. Endless ways to outsmart your opponents. In this refinement of your favorite social deduction games, you’ll have to leverage your persuasion, manipulation and bluffing skills to climb closer to victory. Will you fall to obscurity, or ascend to glory?
Meet nineteen reimagined classics
From Lady Macbeth to Puck, experience the trials of the most famous characters to grace the stage.
Manipulate and deceive your enemies
Lie about your cards to utilize any action you’d like - and call bluffs if you think someone’s lying.
Enjoy fresh games with strategic depth
Each character presents only the goal, not the method: will you be persuasive, analytic, or opportunistic?
Captain’s Gambit is for you if…
You’ve enjoyed Coup, Werewolf, Secret Hitler, Among Us or Root
You’re looking for deeper games that are fun for 4-8 players
You like social deduction but wish you didn’t have to lie to win
You love seeing and making big brain plays that outsmart everyone
You loved the aesthetic of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet
Review by Unfiltered Gamer
Captain’s Gambit Development Blog
Othello’s fleet currently defends a pivotal strategic point in this sector, defending his people millenia in the past to ensure stability for a split dimension where his people were not routed.
As their dear friend Romeo turns to larger goals for the sake of Juliet, Mercutio steps in to fight a personal battle against Tybalt.
Your success with Rosalind will depend on your ability to act with bravery and your ability to pivot at a moment’s notice. Do you have what it takes to win?
As their dear friend Romeo turns to larger goals for the sake of Juliet, Mercutio steps in to fight a personal battle against Tybalt.
Bo Moore is a illustrator, artist and writer living in New Zealand. She's worked on everything from children's book illustrations to concept art, and specializes in the weird and the nonhuman - aliens, monsters, animals, and everything in between.
Lady Macbeth is a captain best known for her ruthless ambition. In order for her to survive her accession, she needs to slowly collect blood while remaining undetected. Then, when the moment is right, she can reveal herself and claim the victory.
On the surface, she might just seem like some kind of bloody Prospero. And, to be fair, that was basically her original design pitch. But while these two captains share some notable similarities, they also have one key difference: context.
Despite their many revisions throughout the development of Captain’s Gambit, the core concept behind Titus has remained the same. Inspired by D.Va from Overwatch, Alvin pitched Titus as a “last-stand” captain. The idea was that right when they were about to die they would suddenly explode, taking multiple players down with them. By tying the amount of damage dealt to their blood, players could estimate the impact someone would have if they died and were secretly Titus. This created a tricky tension between killing Titus off early to reduce their reveal’s power, or leaving them alive as a potential ticking time bomb.
The funniest thing about Puck is that the best way to play him also happens to put you in the most danger of total self-sabotage.
You’ve mastered the basics. Now it’s time to level up and becomes the greatest Captain in the Stratford Galaxy!
The uncertainty of a gambit - its own chance of failing - is actually its advantage. That’s why it’s so powerful.
First time playing Captain’s Gambit? Here are our top tips for newbies to help get you started!
We’ve already touched on a few of the specific win conditions in Captain’s Gambit, such as Hamlet, Cordelia, Brutus, and Rosalind. But today, I want to speak more broadly about the types of win conditions in the game. While every captain’s win condition is unique, they mostly fall within one of five categories: Assassination, Ascension, Devotion, Sabotage, and Domination. Some captains straddle the line between these categories, but it is important to understand these core objectives if you hope to outwit your opponents.
It’s wild to think that it’s already been over 2 months since we successfully funded Captain’s Gambit: Kings of Infinite Space on Kickstarter. When we launched our campaign, we thought we would be lucky if we hit our $15,000 funding goal. But the fact that we managed to not only achieve our goal, but to raise $25,000 AND unlock all our stretch goals, is incredible. Thank you to everyone that helped us bring our first game to life!
We learned a lot from our campaign, and we think it would be interesting to share some of our insights with you. These insights aren’t meant to be an exhaustive list of lessons we learned, but rather highlights on some of our main takeaways.
King Lear was here with us in the early days of Captain’s Gambit, but was eventually replaced with Cordelia as the game evolved.
But thanks to all of our backers who unlocked King Lear as a stretch goal, he now makes a triumphant return as a unique captain in his own right! He’s gone through so many iterations that I can’t even remember a good chunk of them. But we’ve been honing towards a satisfying version of Lear that changes the landscape of the game in a manner befitting of his status.

His system of mutual co-operation once brought much wealth and safety to his kingdom, but in recent years he has grown both vain and naive. This presents an opportunity…