But how do we even know whether the suspects are guilty or not? Well, for this, cards are randomly assigned to each suspect at the beginning of the game that determine their individual guilt. Of course, we don't know anything about this yet either, since the cards are played face down. But we have the opportunity to check up to two suspects in each accusation by secretly looking at a card instead of participating in the current trick.

In this way, gradually more and more jurors know whether the one or other suspect is actually guilty. And based on the respective behaviour in the next tricks, we can draw conclusions about the attitude and further voting behaviour of our fellow jurors.

At some point, all the tricks are done and votes are places, so that the judge's decision can be made. For this purpose, the respective votes (innocent, guilty) are added up for each of the three accused and the judge's decision is made according to simple majority ratios (whereby a tie vote always leads to the detriment of the suspect, we are after all in a post-communist system). Finally, it is checked whether the suspect is actually guilty, although this no longer has any effect on the judge's decision.

However, it does have an impact on the awarding of victory points, because we can only receive those points from suspects who have been judged "correctly" according to our convictions. If, for example, according to my identity card I only want to convict all innocent people, but the convicted person is actually guilty, I will not receive any points from this suspect. The amount of victory points from the respective suspect still dependent on certain characteristics that are assigned to the suspect and that are matched on my identity card with certain values.

So, if, for example, I would get 3 victory points for each "correctly" convicted commissioner, it makes sense to quickly assign this commissioner characteristic to a suspect for whom I am relatively sure of the conviction, at least, if he does not already have this characteristic. Again, this can be done with cards from the tricks that I can assign to one of the suspects as the winner of the trick.

So, we see: Justice is again a sophisticated trick-taking game of a somewhat different kind. In terms of complexity, it is simpler than Tolerance, but it still requires some experience to get the most out of the tricks. Once this experience has been gained after one or two rounds, Justice plays very smoothly and quick. It doesn't hurt the game at all to add a few comments at the one or other situation, so that the story of the respective case and the role of the respective suspect in it evolves during the game. In any case, the short (flavour) texts and the beautiful pictures contribute a lot to the atmosphere.

If you like unusual trick-taking games, you should definitely take a look at the Kickstarter campaign that will be launched on 14th of January 24. I, for one, am looking forward to diving deeper into the role of the juror in the dwarfen world Odrixia in the near future.