Naughty Novices

This week’s board game is one of my favourites, and it's called Nuns on the Run. Nuns is a competitive game for 2 to 8 players but I find it's more fun if you play with at least 5 players; the game feels better and it’s more fun for the abbess and prioress player(s). The game takes place in a convent and the players are either novices or the head nuns and each has their own objectives and goals. The game setup is pretty simple: lay out the board, deal a secret wish card to each novice and a blessing card to each player.

The goal of a novice is to sneak around the convent and try to collect their secret wish. First they must find the necessary key, which is somewhere in the convent. Its location, along with your secret wish, is marked on the secret wish card. The first novice to collect both and return to her room wins. The abbess and prioress are patrolling the halls looking for any novices out after dark—if they catch enough novices equal to the number of players in the games, it's all over and the nuns win.

One of the interesting and fun aspects of the game is that it’s primarily stealth based and uses a pen and paper log system to keep track of the players' movements. The game works like this, the novices have 4 options of movement: running, walking, sneaking and standing still, each having a pro and con which is illustrated on the cards. Each turn you choose which card you want to use and play it face down, then you mark on your log what card you used and what coordinates you ended your turn on and then when everyone is ready you all flip the cards and roll a die. The die roll is to figure out how much noise your shuffling around in the dark has made; more noise means your easier to find but being sneaky and quiet means you’ve made less headway towards your goal. If you make too much noise the nuns might hear you, allowing them to veer of their path and find you.

The prioress and abbess each move along predetermined paths chosen by the player(s) from the guard path deck. The nuns see everything in front of them in a 180 degree arc, so when they patrol their predetermined paths, they can only deviate if they hear or see a novice. Any novices in their line of sight get revealed and are forced to place their player token on the board allowing the nuns to see their movements, making them easier to catch.

Once a nun catches a novice, the novice must return to her room. If she was holding her secret item, it’s confiscated and she has to run to the room and collect another one before she can win the game. She also has to keep her player token on the board until the nuns lose sight of her, at that time she can choose to remove her piece from the board or leave it and continue on her way but as soon as she does, she’s vulnerable to being caught again. It’s not always a good idea to pop out of sight and run as soon as you can.

The last mechanic are the blessing cards, these are one-time use only and give each player a slight edge—they can be used to trick a guard or to escape from one—but the guards can also use them to their advantage.

The game’s stealth mechanics are really what makes the game as fun and challenging as it is; using line of sight and the different hiding places across the map keep the game interesting and it's fast, so you’ll usually be able to knock a few rounds out in an evening pretty quickly.

I recently thought up some drinking game rules for Nuns which can also incorporate any designated drivers you may have. The rules are simply: if one of the guards sees you, take a drink; if you have to place a scritch or a vanish token, take a drink; and if a guard catches you, take a shot, but if you place any of these tokens and a guard can't see and/or catch you, they have to drink as well. If you win the game, all other players have to finish their beverage of choice. As for the driver variant, have your drivers or all around sober living friends play the role of the nuns and remove their drinking rules.

I don’t think I can recommend this game more highly. Most of the games I play are difficult for most people to pick up initially and daunting but this game is really the opposite, it's quick/easy to learn and it's tons of fun overall. It’s definitely worth picking up even if you’re not a big fan of board games.