As per the title - can you announce that you are a character that is not in play currently in Bruno Faidutti's Mascarade ?
3 Answers
ErroneousPlanet has the correct answer, and all of their points are right on. I did find a copy of the rulebook online and scanned it. Below is what I saw.
While the rulebook doesn't explicitly say that you must declare you are a character that is in your instance of the game, it does say at the top of page 7 (emphasis mine) "it is possible to use the power of any character in the game without being that character, even without knowing who you are." I would take this phrasing to mean the instance of the game you are presently playing, not the board game as a whole, so you cannot claim to be a character that is not currently in play.
answered Jan 16, 2015 at 21:42
You can only claim to be one of the characters in the game. The main activity in the game is to make a claim to be a character that is in the game and see if anyone else challenges you by claiming to be the same character. Claiming to be a character that is not in the game goes against the spirit of the game as no one should have to penalize their selves just to expose a player that is trying to play this way.
When you do play the game, it is recommended that you put out all the character tokens of the characters you will be playing with. That way each player can look to see which characters are in the game. Hopefully this clear up any confusion about who is in the game or not.
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Do you have a source for this? I thought the same thing but could not find anything in the rulebook or the BGG forums. Jan 16, 2015 at 15:10
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Unfortunately the rulebook no longer appears to be online and my read through of the rulebook did not explicitly state that this was the case. However, I'm looking at the English version and am unsure if there is a more specific statement about this in one of the other languages. Jan 16, 2015 at 15:13
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The rulebook does state that after you select the characters the others are returned to the box. I take this to mean that they are out of the game and not available for declaration. As the only way to call bluffs is to claim to also be that character, it would only make sense to only be able to call characters that are in the game. Jan 16, 2015 at 15:16
I emailed Bruno Faidutti to ask for a canonical source for this:
My email
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The rulebook states that "it is possible to use the power of any character in the game without being that character", does this include characters not currently in play?
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His response
No, it doesn’t!
So there we have it: only in play cards can be announced.