Disclaimer: This is a Kickstarter Preview of the social deduction game Billionaire Sergeant. The provided preview copy contained graphics, text, and components that were not final. No money changed hands for this preview

60s Hong Kong. A cadre of corrupt HKPD sergeants shake down the city for hundreds of millions. Organized crime is rampant, aided and abetted by the HKPD.

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Billionaire Sergeant drops its players into this era, assigns them as either corrupt or honest police, and tasks them with winning the game for their team. So far so social deduction - but Headblown Studios have apparently been reading my mind as they set out to fix every single one of my problems with the genre.

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No Poker Face Required.

I cannot lie to save my life - leaving most socdec games off the table, but in Billionaire Sergeant, much more important than hiding your allegiance is choosing the correct moment to declare it - whether out loud or through in game actions that swerve the outcome dramatically to your team’s favor.

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But why would you reveal your allegiance? Isn’t the whole point of social deduction to hide your side so the other team can’t socially deduce it? And aren’t you normally just excluded from the game if people know who you are?

The three teams of Billionaire Sergeant are constantly shifting and sometimes out for themselves. The (rapidly dwindling) loyal officers who just want to do good police work without painting targets on their backs - corrupt cops who are more or less looking out for themselves - and the Sergeant himself, who wins alone if he can bribe enough loyal police onto his side.

This fractuous loyalty system cleverly sidesteps the problem of being ‘eliminated’ once people know which side you’re on and freeze you out If, as a dirty cop you can’t secure enough cash to flee Hong Kong and win the game solo, you can gang up with your fellow bad apples and sink enough court cases to win that way - or turn threaten to honest again and to hell with the lot of you. You could sabotage fellow corrupt cops, mislead the Sergeant as to who’s dirty and who’s not, or just threaten a key witness from testifying in court.

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The ability to go from honest to corrupt and back again - or pretending to be honest to accrue as much cash as you can and pulling a solo win - keeps players juggling uncertainty and tension until the very end.

There are always clues if you know where to look.

The core mechanics of Billionaire Sergeant are the role selection and investigation phases. Players can choose to act as lead investigators; selecting teams to work cases and submitting evidence to court - these players have a huge influence on the game’s outcome.

Alternatively players can take on a support role - gathering dirt on their fellow officers and potentially tampering with investigations. Both roles have their advantages and selecting who you will work with on each case is a big choice, as many actions let you work with (or sabotage) your case partner.

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Between the role selection phase, the investigation phase, the court phase, who’s playing intel cards on whom, and just good reading of your opponents, you’ll have plenty of information to deduce who’s on which side - within a certain margin of error. But being too straight and narrow will make you a prime target for bribes, and being too obviously dirty will get you cold shouldered from working cases - which is when you break out the big guns and threaten that if you’re going down, you’re taking them all with you.

Walking on the edge.

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Every moment in Billionaire Sergeant is balanced on the point of the knife it gives you to cut yourself with. There’s so many tools to deduce identity that you have to camouflage yourself like the best of them - while not simply rolling over and handing the game to the other side.

The game is overly complicated in parts (there are many, many phases) and sometimes too subtle for its own good, requiring players to go multiple plays before figuring out the intricacies of their own options - Nevertheless, it remains an excellent social deduction game that captures that Infernal Affairs style of Machiavellian maneuvering, with the stellar artwork by Roxy Dai eschewing rain-slicked neon streets in favor of snapshotting historical Hong Kong in warm pastels and borderless hues. I haven’t even gotten to play the expansion, 1974, which expands the intrigue and swells the player count to a chaotic 8 cops.

If you're into SocDec, Billionaire Sergeant is a cool take on a genre that once held no appeal for me. The game is on Kickstarter right now.

A social deduction game that fixes all my problems with social deduction games: Billionaire Sergeant

Calvin Wong

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