Hidden Leaders - First Play!

14th June 2022

It's a Tuesday and we're with the Woking Board Gaming Club at The Sovereigns for some gaming entertainment.

​I always thought a good leader leads by example and doesn't hide? On the other hand most leaders don't have to contend with 4 feuding factions and the undead!
Hidden leaders is a fantasy themed sort of hidden role (Leader!) game with a dash of social deduction.

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What's in a game?

• Cards: Hidden Leaders uses 2 types of cards.
  • Leader cards: In a game called 'Hidden Leaders' there should definitely be cards called leader cards. The leader cards we played with were oversized, I'm not sure if that's a Kickstarter exclusive or standard in the game, either way they look pretty good.
    There are 6 unique, illustrated leader cards and each depicts icons from 2 of the game's 4 factions, these are 2 factions that the leader aligned to.
    More on factions below.
  • Hero cards: There are 70-odd hero cards in the game, while each is individual, they also share some common elements. Each hero card has a faction they are allied with, each also have a special ability as displayed on the bottom half of the card. These abilities perform a wide variety of actions, mostly to do with manipulating the game's 2 meeples.
  • Buried emperor: This is a special unique card in that is aligned with all 4 factions and begins the game - well buried in the graveyard.
• Game board: This small board that colourfully depicts a fantasy landscape along with the game's 4 factions one each side of the board.
  A 12-spot track conveniently numbered 1-12 is also displayed on the board. The final 4 spaces of the track are 'dark', this is important at the game end.
  Finally around the board's edges are icons for:
  Harbour/draw deck: Next to the sea!
  Tavern/drafting area: There are 3 tavern spots for 3 cards.
  Graveyard/discard pile: Pretty explanatory.
  Wilderness/other discard pile: OK, this will require some explaining, more on this below.
  
• Meeples: The game comes with two differently coloured solid looking stylised wooden meeples which represent 2 of the game's factions; a red crown for the empire and green mountain for the tribes.

There aren't too many components to Hidden Leaders but they're all of a good quality as you'd expect from any modern game. The cards are OK, the board is fine and the meeples are of a satisfyingly chunky quality.

Art-wise, Hidden Leaders is fantastic, each character is unique and has their own name and illustration, all of which are cartoony, brash and colourful, it's a style that appealing and perfectly fits the game's slightly humorous and not too serious theme.

There are icons for the 4 factions which are easily understood as well as a handful of other icons. It doesn't take long to comprehend all of this and it won't prove an obstacle.

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How's it play?

• ​Hidden Leaders: Shuffle the leader cards and deal 1 face-down to each player, these should be kept secret until the game end.
• Game board: Put out the following and carry out the following.
  • Buried Emperor: Put the 'Buried Emperor' face-up in the graveyard spot adjacent it's symbol.
    All other cards placed in the graveyard must be face-up.
  • Hero cards: Shuffle the hero cards into a face down deck and place it adjacent to the harbour icon.
    Draw one card for each of the 3 tavern spaces and place them face-up adjacent to the tavern icons.
  • Meeples: Put the meeples on to their starting spot - the '4' space.
  • Players: Now deal 5 hero cards to each player. Each player must then play a hero card 'face-down' into their personal playing area.
  • Wilderness: Now each player must discard 1 card to the wilderness spot. This means each player has a hand of 3 cards.
    All cards discarded into the wilderness spot are always discarded face-down.
  • First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Hidden leaders is a game primarily about manipulating the 2 meeples on the board because their relative positioning at the game end will determine which faction wins the game and by extension which player wins.
This done by recruiting i.e. playing hero cards into your personal playing to create your own band of heroes.

There are 4 factions.
Black: Undead.
Blue: The Water Folk.
Green: The Hill Tribe.
​Red: The Imperial Army.

The game uses usual a traditional turn structure with the active player completing their action before play progresses to the player to their left.
During the active player's turn, the following must occur.

• Play or discard: The active player must choose 1 of the 2 following actions.
  Play card: The active plays a card from their hand into their personal playing where it will stay (Unless another actions changes this.) and resolves the action on the bottom of the card which typically involves moving the 1 or 2 meeples around. There a great variety of actions that involve moving meeples, taking or putting cards into the graveyard etc and sometimes card will both a bit of both.
  Usually, cards played this way are played face-up.
  Discard hand: If a player does not want to play any card, they must discard their entire hand and thus will have 0 cards in hand!
• Draw cards: The active player now draws cards to get their hand size up to 4. Thus if they played a hero card, they will draw 2 new hero cards. If they discarded their hand, they will draw 4 cards.
  Cards can be drawn from the tavern spots or blindly from the harbour deck as the active player sees fit.
• Discard: Now that the active player has 4 card, they must discard 1 to the wilderness discard pile. Thus, players should always have 3 cards in their hand at the end of their turn.
• Next player: The player to the left now becomes the active player.

Endgame
The game continues until any player has put 5-8 face-up hero cards into play (Dependant upon player count.), face-down heroes do not count for the purpose of triggering the game end. When this occurs, the current turn is the last turn and we go to declaring a winner.

First, the victorious faction must be determined, each one has their own winning criteria based on the positioning of the 2 meeples on the track.
Black (Undead.) wins if both meeples are in the black area of the track, that is on spaces 9-12. This is regardless of the positioning of the meeples relative to each other.
Blue (Water folk.) win if both meeples are on the same or an adjacent space on the track - provided of course they are both not in the black spaces.
Red (Empire.) wins if the red meeple is 2+ spaces further along the track than the green meeple, ​so long as both meeples are not in the black area.
Green (Tribe.) wins conversely, if the green meeples is 2+ spaces further along the track than the red meeple, again, 

Next; players reveal their hidden leader cards and face-down hero cards.
The player whose leader is aligned to the winning faction, wins!
It's quite likely that more than player will have a leader aligned to the winning faction. If this is the case, then the player with the most hero cards aligned to the winning faction wins.

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Overall
The first thing to mention is the game's asymmetrical winning criteria, it's something I've not seen elsewhere and is key to Hidden Leaders' appeal and informs all of the gameplay and tactics mentioned below.

The objective is pretty straightforward in Hidden Leaders. Players will not only be trying to manipulate the meeples to their own advantage but also trying to deduce the  motives of their opponents from their actions. This will allow players to try and anticipate their opponent's actions to their own advantage.

E.g., a player moves the red meeple up closer to green one which is ahead, is it because they want to bring them together to want the red meeple to overtake the green or do they want to put the meeple in the black area.
In this example, one single move can work towards the winning conditions of 3 factions.

Interestingly, when cards are discarded to the wilderness, it's face-down so others can't try and see which cards are essentially worthless to the discarding player. Further more, players will at least 1 face-down hero.
All of this is compounded by each leader being aligned to 2 factions so it can be hard to try and guess which faction they're supporting.
It's a great use of 'imperfect knowledge' mechanics that will keep players on their toes.

Hidden Leaders is a fairly easy to learn rules-light game, it mixes this accessibility with a higher level of play and depth of complexity that comes from trying to anticipate the actions of opponents that will make players think.
So, while theoretically the game has a reasonably quick play time, some players will spend a lot of time analysing their options and next move. In short; the analysis paralysis can be strong with this one and it seemed to take longer than expected. But that can be down to the players.
It should also be noted that whilst Hidden Leaders doesn't really have direct interaction between players, it definitely has a bit 'take that' mechanics. It's not too harsh to be fair but it's there and I for some players this is a no-no.
Having said all of that, I found the gameplay a little slow, it felt like 1 card-play/actions wasn't quite satisfying enough and it felt like there was a bit too much downtime between turns, although we did play with a player count at the higher end.

Otherwise I can't fault Hidden Leaders. If card games fairly heavy on deductive reasoning and trying to gauge the motives of other players are something you like, you'll probably find this engaging and enjoyable.