Small Cloth Bags and Why We Play Boardgames, Sheriff of Nottingham 2nd Edition
Some nights, when I’m two hours deep into some long complicated boardgame, and I’m shuffling the deck for the umpteenth time, and I’m exchanging a cardboard coin worth twenty into ten coins worth two, and I’m moving fifteen little army men across the map and setting them upright when they inevitably fall over, I start to wonder: why am I doing this?
More specifically, why isn’t a computer doing this? Why aren’t we playing this online, where the deck shuffles instantly and the army men never fall over? If the point is to play a game, to explore a puzzle and make interesting strategic decisions, what do boardgames offer me that the vast library of digitized equivalents cannot? And then I remember Sheriff of Nottingham.
In Sheriff of Nottingham, players take on the role of merchants trying to bring goods into Nottingham to sell, contending with the overbearing Sheriff’s inspections for contraband. Each round, players draw a hand of six cards featuring a random assortment of legal and contraband goods. Players get one chance to discard and draw (adjusting their hand), and then must select up to five cards to bring to market. Once everyone has selected their cards, they place them in small cloth pouches, seal them shut with a clasp, and hand them over to the Sheriff with a short declaration of what is inside.
“Here you are ma’am, three rinds of cheese!”
Merchants are only allowed to bring one type of legal good to market each round (i.e. four chickens or four apples, but not a combination of two apples and two chickens), and they are expressly forbidden from bringing any of the lucrative contraband cards. Merchants score more coins the more goods they bring to market, but the nature of the deck means that assembling more than three of one type of legal good is quite difficult. In essence, each merchant is highly incentivized to lie about what exactly their small cloth pouch contains.
The sheriff (played by a new player each round), must then decide for each pouch whether she wants to open it or keep it sealed. If she opens a pouch and finds that the merchant lied, that merchant must pay a fine. On the flipside, if the sheriff harasses an honest merchant who was telling the truth, she is required to pay a fine to them. Finally, before any decision is made on opening a bag or letting it pass, merchants have an opportunity to offer the sheriff bribes in the form of cash, goods, or future favors.
“Ma’am I have five coins with your name on them if you let my bag go. Five more if you promise to open Jacob’s bag this round!”
Once the sheriff has made a decision on each pouch, the contents of all non-opened pouches are revealed and the next round begins with a new sheriff.
The mechanics of Sheriff of Nottingham are extremely simple, instantly familiar to anyone who has played a bluffing game. It’s also lightning quick to teach. The core concept of the game takes thirty seconds to explain, and all the specific rules can be explained as you play the first round. The publishers recommend players be 14 years old, but I’ve found younger children have no problem understanding Sheriff.
The real magic of Sheriff, however, isn’t in its lovely art design or its clean bluffing and bribing mechanics; it’s in its physicality. The mechanic of handing over goods for inspection could have easily been accomplished with a face down pile of cards, but designers Sérgio Halaban and André Zatz understood the true value of a prop. The physical experience of handling these cloth pouches is so much fun, in a way that struggles to be communicated.
I struggle to describe the change that washes over a player who's just been handed three bags of potential contraband. The way they pick up the cloth and narrow their eyes. How they shake it and grin or grimace. How they closely watch the bag’s owner, searching for any hints in their face. When they choose to open the bag, the end of negotiation is marked by the sharp snap of the clasp, followed closely by groans or cheers. Sheriff does a better job than most roleplaying games at getting players to emotionally inhabit a character. When it’s a player’s turn to be the Sheriff, they become the Sheriff.
Sheriff is a shining example of the unique purview of boardgames as a medium. It is a reminder of the power of physicality and presence; how simple props and real human motion can turn puzzles into emotion. Would it be possible to translate the game of Sheriff into a digital form? Sure, absolutely. But could you digitally recreate the experience of Sheriff? Not in a million years.
If you’re looking for a clean and simple boardgame experience, one where the game pieces aren’t chores to manage, but rather invitations to engage with the people sitting around the table with you, give Sheriff of Nottingham a shot!
