Potato Tomato

The Game

Potato Tomato is a party game from Thailand. This is a social deduction game. You are either in Team Potato or Team Tomato. Your aim is to kill one member of the other team, after which your team wins. At the start of the game, you know which team you are on, but you don't know who else are on your team. The game is a process of working out who is friend and who is foe, and then killing off one foe in order to win. There's a twist - players may switch teams during the course of the game. 

You get five identity cards at the start of the game. An identity card is either potato or tomato. Depending on which ones you have more of, you belong to that team. During the game you might swap cards with others, and this is how you might switch to the other team. When you attack another player, you give fire tokens to your target. Anyone who accumulates 5 fire is forced to reveal one identity card. You lose once all five of your cards are revealed, and your team loses with you. 

On your turn, you draw cards from a small action deck. You keep drawing cards one by one for as long as you like. The cards come in four types - blue, green, blue + green, and grey. Every card specifies an action you can perform, so you want to draw more cards. However if you get to three green or three blue cards, you lose your actions and you are penalised instead. So this is push-your-luck. 

There are many types of actions. There are specific rules about how many cards of each colour should be in the action deck. The game gives you more cards than you need, allowing you to choose the mix of actions you want to play with. This action card above lets you swap one of your identity cards with another player. Note that any such swapping is limited to identity cards which are still face-down. Cards which have been revealed are locked. 

Players will attack one another and reveal one another's identity cards, until one person gets all cards exposed and loses together with his team. The game is a process if identifying your teammates then working together to defeat the other team. In case things go south, you may try to betray your team. 

The Play

This is a game with a lot of attacking. Randomly at first, maybe. Or maybe some people do have personal grudges. As you gradually work out who's on which team, your attacking will be more deliberate. I did a five player game. Being the guy who brings and teaches games comes with its occupational hazards. I'm often the first to get targeted in games like this. I told them to hold their horses because some of them might be on the same team as me. My initial cards were 3 potato and 2 tomato, so I was Team Potato. However it wasn't that hard for me to switch to Team Tomato. I only needed to swap one potato card with a tomato card. I was first to have cards exposed, but it didn't necessary mean they could be sure of my identity quickly. You need to reveal three cards of the same team to be sure of a player's identity. Even when you reveal four cards of the same person, they might be 2x potato and 2x tomato, and you still can't be sure. Also the player might still swap his last card. I find this rather clever. 

In our game, Alex and Danny were quick to work out that they were both in Team Tomato. I appeared to be on Team Potato from the cards initially revealed, so they came after me with enthusiasm. Seet Han was initially in Team Potato. He didn't come to my rescue, and instead switched teams and started attacking me too. Eventually Ong was my only ally. Team Potato had three of us and we probably could have worked together to kill Alex or Danny in time. Unfortunately I couldn't muster enough support (or sympathy). There can be some politicking in this game. 

The Thoughts

This is a highly interactive party game. There is a lot of "take that". The team mechanism is clever. There is a gradual build towards a climax as identities become more and more certain. The more information you have, the nearer you are to the end of the game. Sometimes you might be surprised with the results. The process of working out who's who is organic, sometimes confusing (because you forget which cards have been swapped with which other cards), but usually funny. Initially I wondered whether the game would be less fun or feel unfair when the number of players is odd, due to the number of members per team being unequal. Having played the game, this doesn't seem to be a problem. It is possible to jump ship. This feels more like an individual victory game than a team victory game, because teams are not fixed.