Good Cop Bad Cop - A Criminally Underrated Party Game
- Reuben Levine
- Feb 3
- 10 min read
Updated: Feb 12
Good Cop Bad Cop is a 2014 release from Overworld Games that Brian Henk and Clayton Skancke designed. The award-winning game is a fantastic mix of social deduction and luck just waiting for you and up to seven friends. The actual components are incredibly simple, with fifty-two cards and a few plastic tokens.
You will be dealt three secret role cards at the beginning of the game, which come in two variations: the honest cops and the crooked cops. The honest team has to take out the crooked team and vice versa. Each team is captained by either the agent or the kingpin, and the game is only over when one of them is killed. In addition to the slew of actions that you can take on your turn are the action cards and guns in the center of the table that can be picked up by sacrificing one-third of your identity.
The Good
Good Cop Bad Cop is an absolute masterclass in terms of its pacing. Every single time you play this game, it starts with a slow, suspicious sense of fear ruminating around the table and quickly builds up into a wild, excitable beast where every split-second move counts. It is able to achieve this through its hidden roll mechanic. If two of your three cards are honest, you are on the honest team, but if two of three are crooked, then you are crooked. The twist is that if you are either the Agent or the Kingpin, then you are automatically honest or crooked, respectively. This means that at the beginning of the game you are completely clueless as to who is on your team.
Unlike many other games in the hidden role genre, Good Cop Bad Cop does not unnecessarily unbalance the teams, as everybody is on an equal playing field. There is no way to vote anyone out, nor is there any advantage to being one team or another. This is what keeps you scared at the beginning because you are simply alone.
Two of the most powerful things in this game, the action cards and guns force you to flip up one of your three role cards for everyone to see. It is only because you cannot re-arrange these role cards and that they must stay in front of you that the pacing works the way that it does. Rapidly over the first few rounds, as you scramble to arm yourself and discover more about the people around you, you are giving away some of your own information. This trade-off causes the sudden revelation of who is and is not on your team, as well as conceals many twists within its mechanics.
Imagine, for a moment, that the person across the table has a crooked card flipped up in front of them. If you were to spend your turn looking at one of their face-down cards and you find another crooked card, you might assume that they are on the crooked team. Armed with this information, you decide to shoot them because you're on the honest team, only to find out that their third card was the Agent, and you’ve just shot your boss.
The sudden explosion of information always forces this game to be a rapid and interesting subversion of expectations as you quickly learn and then are disproven who is working for and against you. It is because the teams are not imbalanced that this revelation is not a complete game-ender. If you are revealed to be on the crooked team, that does mean that roughly half of the table is going to be on your side as well.
This all gets incredibly more interesting when you factor in the action cards. These cards have the ability to force people to swap teams, drop their weapons, reveal their cards, and many more crazy things. The rate of revelation in this game is utterly perfect and will always leave you on the edge of your seat. When you are low on information, you're spending your time carefully judging the reactions of other players to get a sense of what they are learning. When you rush to arm yourself and give up pieces of yourself, you are, again, looking to see who is giving you the nod and who might be avoiding eye contact. Finally, in the late stages of the game when most information is revealed, a mad dash occurs where you desperately try and defend your team while taking out the others.
One of the most interesting mechanics in this game is that after you have performed your action, whether it be picking up an action card, a gun, or sneaking a look at somebody's card, you must then aim your gun at somebody. This prevents you from whipping your aim to a player after they have revealed themselves, making the game even more tense. Incredibly, all this tension is able to fit into ten to twenty minutes that, even after multiple repeated games, never fail to deliver.
Actually, playing this game really does give you the feeling of a cop in an interrogation room. You're carefully watching your friends, looking to see what information they might be learning while doing your best to put together the whole picture yourself. The obscuring of information never makes this task easy, as people are desperate to hide themselves from you while still trying to figure you out.
Just as you think you have carefully puzzled the game together, it is already almost over, as everybody else has done the same at roughly the same time. The yelling ensues as you rapidly try to convince people you're on their side and you need them to act a certain way, or everything is lost. Desperately, you try to convey your message as a detective might to the rest of his team in crisis.
Truly, this game is yet to provide an experience without the exuberant and joyful yelling of an entire table as we all try and do the mental math to figure out if we are going to win or lose and whether or not we can affect that outcome. This is only expounded upon in bigger groups as the amount of people working against you grows exponentially.
The real standout moments of this game stem from the lack of information that is ever prevalent in a hidden role game. You watch your friends make the wrong or right decisions that will inevitably hurt your team, but saying something might alert people to your allegiance. Staring down the barrel of a gun that is pointed at you only for the person aiming it to whip it at a common enemy at the last moment is always exhilarating. The feeling of a police force divided and fighting one another is so powerful it's impossible to ignore.
To me, the actual core mechanics of this game are irrefutably the best part about it. The way that the rules blend perfectly with every single action card allows for explosive and unexpected play at every corner that never feels too overpowered but always feels incredibly cool. The action cards always revolve around the core mechanics of the hidden role cards, which means that they are always interacting with the secrets that you are trying to keep and the knowledge that you have, expounding and exploring secret information while occasionally obscuring it for others.
The wow factor of this game is strictly from its excitement and simplicity. You can do any of the same four things on your turn as well as play an action card, which leaves the player's brain space completely free so that they can focus on the allegiance, which moves to make, and how to make it. The fact that you can decide which role card you reveal when you arm yourself means that there is a great degree of tactics. In addition, it’s important you don’t let the limited available actions trick you, as picking the right one feels like a momentous task that will have profound impacts on the rest of the game. Thankfully for those filled with indecision, games are short, quick, and punchy, meaning that a game is quick and you can give it all another go very soon after.
The Bad
As much as I want to call this game perfect, it does come with a few intrinsic flaws. While they are small, it is important that you understand some of the major faults that come with this box. The first, in my opinion, is the player count. While the game advertises four to eight, it can sometimes be difficult to play with the lower bound. Occasionally, because of the way that the cards are dealt, it could be that there is one honest player against three crooked players, which is technically possible to win but incredibly difficult. I have had this happen to me a few times, and it is never enjoyable to be ganged up on by everybody else. In addition, I think this game could actually serve by accommodating more players to give it a sense of a more grandiose ordeal rather than a backwater police station fight.
Another glaring flaw with this game is some of the action cards. While earlier I did mention that they never feel overpowered, this is not entirely true. Some of these cards either don’t appear when they should, are way too powerful, or simply make the game feel cheap. An example of this is a card that swaps all your honest cards for crooked ones and vice versa, stacking the teams and changing your objective in the middle of the game. While the idea behind this card is incredible, when it is used right at the end of the game to sway the tide, it can feel like a really cheap way to win. Imagine you have your shot lined up, and the game is about to end, the rest of your team is exuberant that their hard work has paid off however, just before you pull the trigger, somebody says, “Oh no, actually, you not on that team anymore.” The first time it happens, it’s fantastically funny, but after that, it becomes almost annoying.
Other cards, such as the defibrillator, which can bring players back to life, are in too short supply in a deck that you probably won't play through. This means that a player can end up dead at the beginning and be unable to come back for the rest of the game. Even worse, if a player on the other team grabs the only defibrillator card, it's game over for you. This typically leads to some frustration and can be incredibly annoying.
To elaborate more on death within this game, I do believe that it can be incredibly difficult to deal with. There is no mechanic stopping somebody from shooting you by turn two, which can propel the game incredibly quickly into somewhere that it doesn't shine. The mechanics of this game revolve around sensible player decisions where they do not decide to aimlessly shoot at whoever they please. If a player does choose to do this, or if the game goes on longer than expected, then whoever is dead will be left with nothing to do but watch the game unfold around them with absolutely no influence. In addition, the fact that you can accidentally reveal who people are by shooting blindly means that a lucky player can really ruin the progression of the game. I am yet to find players who act in this way, even those who don’t really know how to play, so lucky shots are more of a hypothetical problem.
The simplicity of this game's ruleset might cause somebody to be turned off. However, I would make the argument that the mechanics are still incredibly interesting and worth grappling with. The critique of the mechanics actually comes from the lack of protection for the bad things that I have previously mentioned. As you might imagine, a rule preventing players from flipping up their cards when they are shot might stop wild second-round shootings. In addition, the inclusion of more defibrillator cards or a way that players can interact after death might stop players from feeling left out completely. The fact that the game does not address these glaring issues is a major problem and one that has to be considered. While it was most likely a decision based on simplification or a small oversight, it still allows for some pretty major problems to manifest.
The Other Stuff
The box itself is wonderfully small and easy to transport. When I was younger, I used to take this game to school and summer camp, and, somehow, it has stood up to the beating that is being inside of my backpack. The cards themselves are of an appropriate quality, but I found myself sleaving them pretty quickly. The cardboard stands are a wonderful addition and add a massive amount of tact to the process of grabbing a gun. Having a somewhat 3D object being pointed at you is terrifying, and picking it up is equally cool. In addition, the art style of the cards is simplistic yet powerful and only aids the feeling of being in a police station in turmoil.
When I first bought the game, I struggled to put the stands onto the guns however, once they were on, I was excited to find out that the box could still fit all the components with the stands attached. This meant that I did not have to pull on and off the impossibly tight clamps, justifying the initial setup.
I think that this game is easily enjoyable by anyone, both the tactician and the brand-new. The inclusion of the “lead detective” stand, which denotes whose turn it is, provides a list of possible actions on the back. This, I have found, Is essential and helpful for new players. The fact that there are only four actions is also incredibly helpful as the simplicity allows for anyone to enjoy it. If you are looking for a good time, then this is the game for you, especially if you have a large group hungry for an interesting game. If you are interesting in how this game will adapt for a family gathering, give "Fun For The Family" a look with the button below.
Good Cop Bad Cop By Overworld Games gets a gold rating which you can learn more about in our "What We Do For You" section.
PLEASE NOTE: This review is based of the 2nd edition of this game, the third edition currently exists and they crowd funding the fourth edition below. If you want to get this edition, you may have to search amazon.
Have you played the game? Did you like it? Do you want us to look at any other editions of this game or any expansions? Fill in this quiz; Let us know!
Reuben Levine
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