Shipwrecked with strangers in the middle of the ocean, with scarce resources and even scarcer trust in each other. As tension rises and starvation sets in, your companions may be more inclined to throw you overboard to make rations last longer. All while mother nature is doing her best to ensure that no one is returning home. Calenture is a social deduction-game in which you have to gather your collective resources to keep the crew alive. But who can you trust when the food turns up spoiled and nobody seems to know where the gun has gone?

More in-depth:

Calenture's playtime is 20-40 minutes and the game includes mechanics such as hidden agendas, resource and card management, random event cards, bluffing and player elimination. Some players will be in it for themselves while others are protectors or saboteurs. You win the game by fulfilling your agenda which most of the time also involves surviving. The game ends when all the players are either dead or rescued. There can be multiple winners or even no winners at all. When the players reach the bottom of the event deck they will get a chance to be rescued, but there will not always be room for all of them.

Players will draw cards from a deck of items. It can be food, weapons and other items that can help or hinder the survival of the group.

The game will throw random events at you, most of the time it involves a challenge that will need to be overcome or something that reveals information about the players. Maybe a storm hits that throws a random card out of the hands of all the players, maybe someone gets to look at the hand of another player and steal a card or just maybe a shark will attack and threaten to eat someone unless they either bribe it with food or hunt it away with the gun. Frequently the event cards will trigger starvation, when this happens the group will contribute item cards to feed the group. But you can contribute as much or as little as you like and the cards will be face down and shuffled so it will be harder to know who put in what. There are no restrictions on what items can be contributed and cards like rat-poison that spoils the food exists.

The game features both a lot of opportunities to be sneaky and manipulative as well as giving the players tools to get information on their fellow players intentions. If a saboteur is caught the group can vote to throw them overboard if they have the majority so it is of utmost importance to know when to lay low and when to strike.

—description from the designer

Games