Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
"Without teamwork, you will never survive. Without betrayal, you’ll never win." Cutthroat Caverns is played over 9 rounds, each with a random encounter.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Simultaneous Action Selection
Choose actions secretly or concurrently before revealing them together.
Kill Steal
Claim a reward by delivering the final contribution to a shared target.
Player Elimination
Players can be removed from contention before the game ends.
Semi-Cooperative Game
Players share some objectives while retaining individual victory conditions.
Take That
Direct negative effects at selected opponents.
Read the full game description
"Without teamwork, you will never survive. Without betrayal, you’ll never win." Cutthroat Caverns is played over 9 rounds, each with a random encounter. Essentially a game of 'kill stealing'. Each round, any monster encountered will have a prestige value of 1 through 6. The player that successfully jockeys for position and lands the killing blow gets the prestige value for the encounter. Some encounters will not have a specific monster, such as a trap room for the heroes to pass through (and in this case, earning no prestige). The surviving player with the most prestige after the 9 encounters is the winner. If the players do not survive all 9 encounters, no one wins the game. A unique combination of cooperative game play and opportunistic backstabbing.