How to Play
Captains
Your captain card tells you how to win: for example, you might need to kill a specific enemy, or bloody your hands more than anyone else. To succeed, persuade opponents to work with you - even faking your identity, if necessary - and manipulate others into attacking your ideal targets.
Will you pretend to be Cordelia to lure your opponent into a vulnerable position? Will you label your enemy as the feared technomancer Prospero, creating a distraction that lets you sneak in your own victory?
Captain’s Gambit is a game of identity deduction and timely betrayals. You can leverage your tactical skills to calculate the shifting odds, or leverage your improv talents to fast-talk your way out of trouble. Everyone brings their own skillset to the game - play to discover yours.
Permits
Your two permit cards give let you do Permit Actions. You’ll choose one action per turn, like Overcharge to gain energy or Barrage to deal damage.
These cards are hidden from others. This means you’re only supposed to choose actions that match one of your two permit cards.
…However, in Captain’s Gambit you are free to lie and declare whatever actions you want! If you look truthful enough, you can can get away with doing any action you feel like.
If you don’t believe someone else actually has a permit card, you can call them out: if you do, either your opponent will forfeit their action and take 3 damage, or they’ll show you their permit card, and you take 3 damage.
To succeed, you must make the best of every situation, either by skillfully planning out your actions, by smooth-talking some players into helping you, by laying low and passing by unnoticed, or by speaking out and distracting everyone. How will you win?
Captain’s Gambit is for the player who…
Enjoys games like Coup, Werewolf, D&D, Dungeon World, or SSBM
Prefers their games to feel unique every time they play
Wants games that are actually fun for 6-8 players
Likes to follow metagames as they evolve and shift over time
Loves watching and making big brain plays that outsmart everyone else
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…