This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Pinched!
Designer: Jonathan Gilmour-Long & David Gordon
Year: 2025
Country: U.S.A.
Publisher: Mighty Boards
Pinched! is a set collection and social deduction game in which you are a thief looking to burglarize mansions to appropriate their wealth, or level the economic playing field as the game’s flavor text frames the issue. The rich have so much, so why not take a little?
There are four mansions and a bank. The mansions are inhabited by colorful characters and feature different game mechanical effects. They also feature four or five loot cards.
As the round progresses, each player takes a turn being the mastermind. As the mastermind, you choose a mansion to target. The other players try to guess which mansion you chose. Every player who guessed correctly gets to share in your loot. If nobody guessed which mansion you were going to target you get all the loot.
The trouble is that loot comes in different varieties and you’re trying to collect sets of identical cards so you can fence them off. Thus, another player might notice that a certain mansion is very attractive to you based on your visible cards, and guess that you strike there. But you are cleverer than that! You choose a sub-optimal mansion to throw your competitors off the scent. Or perhaps you choose the most obvious one as a double-bluff, banking on the fact that your opponents expect you to be devious.
I played the game in the Finnish translation, and the humor came through wonderfully. The language and terminology had been translated with flair, often sounding like the kind of stylized language you might encounter in a Donald Duck comic book. (As cultural context, Donald Duck comics have been translated into Finnish in a very specific idiom that’s not really present in the English or Italian originals.) This suited the game’s charming, cartoony visual aesthetic very well.