Saboteur is a path-laying strategy game where the cards are your resource in a team effort to get the dwarves to their gold. However, one player is a secret traitor who must try and foil the dwarves without them realising it. It is a game about working together to defeat a common, but unknown enemy, whilst they try to ruin your game without being found out.

Play starts by laying down the mine entrance card and three destination gold cards 7 card spaces away. Only one of those destinations has gold in it. You then take turns drawing a card that determines who the saboteur is.

Each player is dealt seven cards which represent different directions of tunnels you can lay down and a range of event cards that can help or hinder the other players. The aim is to take turns to lay these cards to get to the destination with the gold.

The clever twist is that one of the event cards lets you look at one of the destinations and confirm whether it contains the gold and in so doing direct your teammates to the correct card. Of course, if you are the saboteur you may decide to misdirect the other players to the wrong card. Although if you do that, and another player checks the same destination card it will give away your role -- unless you can convince the other players that it's not you but the other player who is lying.

A full game consists of 3 rounds of the above, each round ending upon the discovery or failure to discover the gold. Failure happens if nobody has reached the gold destination, the draw pile of cards has run out and nobody can play any more cards in their hand.

The result is a game that starts as a path-laying challenge that soon evolves into a devious game of cat and mouse with the saboteur. Winning or losing often relies on how convincing you can be that you are not the saboteur -- a combination of what you've said and the cards you've played that may or may not persuade the other dwarves.