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Saboteur is a card game by Rederic Moyerson, published in the United States by Z-Man Games.
Players: 3-10
Time: 30-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
This is a review of the American version of the game; it was previously published in Germany by Amigo.
The Components
 Saboteur is a card game which comes with 110 cards and a rulebook. The cards are divided into: role cards; gold nugget cards; start and goal cards; and a play deck. All of the cards are printed on high-quality linen-textured cardstock. They're full color and generally feature good quality artwork.
Role Cards: 11 cards which each either depict a gold-digger (7) or a clearly labeled saboteur (4).
Gold Nugget Cards: Reward cards. There are 28 total, and each distinctly shows 1, 2, or 3 gold nuggets.
Start and Goal Cards: These four "path" cards outline the game board. The start card has four unblocked exits. The goal cards, meanwhile, either show a big black stone or a huge gold nugget; they also have 2 or 4 exits. Each of these cards has a unique back which make them easy to distinguish from the rest of the cards.
Play Deck: The play deck contains 40 more path cards which will be used to form the mines throughout the game. The path cards show caverns with from one to four passages leading out at the compass directions. These passages may be interconnected (which gold diggers like) or blocked (which saboteurs prefer).
There are also 27 action cards.Some of these break mining tools, some fix mining tools, some cause cave-ins, and some let you look at the goal cards. Each features artwork showing generally what the card does, and also inclueds very good iconography.
Rulebook: A full-color rulesheet. They're easy to read, and pretty good for reference, though they seemed too brief in some areas. (I had some issues with where path cards could be played, and other players get confused over a couple of the rules about distribution of gold nuggets).
Overall, the production quality of the game is very good. It's got nice components that are pretty and easy to use. It earns a high "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Saboteur is to build mining tunnels toward the fabled giant gold nugget--unless of course you're a saboteur.
Setup: The start path card is placed face-up on the board. The three goal path cards are shuffled and placed face-down: one goes eight spaces directly across from the start card and the other two go two spaces and and below it.
A set of role cards are shuffled up and one is dealt to each player. These show whether a player is a saboteur or a gold-digger. (The number of saboteurs goes up with the number of players, and you always have one more role card than the number of players, so you never know how many of each role there are in the game).
The main deck is shuffled. Each player is dealt from 4-6 cards depending on the number of players in the game.
The gold nugget cards, which each show 1-3 nuggets, are shuffled up for later use.
Order of Play: During a turn a player plays one card or discards, then draws one card to replace.
Playing a Path Card. Most cards are path cards, which show tunnels carved through the underground. A player may play a path card if he has no broken tools. It must be connected to existing path cards*.
If a path card is played next to a goal card, and it forms an uninterrupted path back to the start card, then the goal card is turned up. If it's the goal card with the treasure, the gold-diggers win.
* The rules here are a little unclear, but from clarifications on the 'net you can play next to any path card on the table, even if it's disconnected from the start space. Whether you can play next to the face-down goal cards or not is equally unclear; I usually play that you can play next any face-up path card.
Playing an Action Cards: Some of the cards are action cards which can be played on yourself or other players.
Some cards break tools (lantern, cart, or pick), which prevent a player from playing path cards until he's fixed them.
Some cards repair those tools, including some that repair your choice of one of two tools.
A rock-fall card lets you remove any path card (except the start or goal cards).
A map card lets you look at any face-down goal card.
 Ending the Round: A round ends either when an uninterrupted path is formed from the start to the treasure goal card (in which case th gold-diggers win) or when the cards run out and no one can play (in which case the saboteurs win).
At this point a somewhat arcane method of distributing gold nuggets occurs.
If the gold-diggers won they take a number of gold cards equal to the number of players. Whoever placed the last path card selects one, then they're passed counter-clockwise around the table to gold-diggers until the cards are all gone. A few players will get more than one. (The counter-clockwise deal is a nice touch, because it encourages you to help the next player get to the treasure.)
If the saboteurs won they each take 2, 3, or 4 nuggets worth of gold, depending on the number of saboteurs in play.
Ending the Game: The game ends after three rounds of play (with each round resulting in the players getting different role cards and then building a different mine). The player with the most nuggets wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Saboteur is a hidden-role tile-laying game.
The recent popularity of hidden role games probably originates with the Mafaia / Werewolf game. Other recent releases in the same vein have included Bang and Shadows over Camelot. Like many other hidden role games, this one supports a large number of people and basically divides players into two groups, each of which can cooperate for a joint victory.
As a tile-laying game, Saboteur may feel familiar to fans of Carcassonne. It does share some similarities, since they're both edge-matching tile-laying games, but in its pure simplicity, Saboteur is closer to "pipe" games, which involve laying tiles to connect up two remote locations. Other examples of pipe games include Cheapass Games' Timeline and Steam Tunnel.
The Game Design
In short, Saboteur is a fun, quick, and unique game. I think it's been largely neglected, and hope that Z-Man Games publishing an English edition will get it the attention it richly deserves.
It's the bluffing that really makes the game: trying to figure out how obvious you should be if you're a saboteur (because if you're too obvious, you'll get your tools all broken), and how you can subtly wreck havoc. Guessing who may be a saboteur or a gold-digger also adds a lot to the game.
The tile-laying is pretty simple, but there's just enough grist to keep it interesting.
There is a fair amount of randomness in the game. Which cards you draw, how many saboteurs there are, and what gold nuggets get drawn at the end can all have a big influence on the game. In fact, I'm largely unconvinced by the gold nugget distribution at the end of the round. It seems largely arbitrary and I'm somewhat unconvinced that it's actually fair.
However, despite that it's a fun game, and I'm happy to play it no matter what arbitrary scoring method it uses. As a result I've let it eke in a full "5" out of "5": for a light game, it's one of the best of class.
Conclusion
Saboteur is a light game of hidden roles, bluffing, and tile laying. I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention to date because it's a lot of fun to play. It can be fairly random, but that seems like a good match for the length, and thus it's quickly risen to the top of my list for fun and interesting fillers.
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