Coup

Coup is fifteen minutes of lying to your friends for twelve dollars, and we have not found a better return on a card game. It earns 4/5 Bamboo and 5/5 Pandas from us, which is to say it is quick to teach and the fun depends entirely on whether your table is willing to look somebody in the eye and say something untrue. Everything we have written about it is collected here.

Start with the review, which is honest about who it is for and who should skip it. Then read player count before your next game night, because Coup peaks at five, plays anywhere from two to six, and the two-player variant is its own animal rather than a smaller version of the same game.

Once your group has a few games in and everybody has stopped believing each other, our strategy guide gets into when to challenge, when to bluff, and why the player nobody is watching usually takes the game. And if you are choosing between the two, Coup vs The Resistance picks by group size: one is a fifteen-minute knife fight, the other is a thirty-minute team paranoia engine.