Insider
BGG rank
BGG #1,298
BGG rating
7.0

Insider

2016

Rules assistance for Insider

Plain-language explanations of turns, card effects and disputed situations, with official source references and saved question history.

  • 4–8 players
  • 15 min
  • 9+
  • Complexity 1.1/5

For 4 players

Rules assistant for Insider

What would you like to know?

Answers come from the official rulebook, with the page to check.

Insider is a board game released in 2016 for 4–8 players, 15 minutes per game, and ages 9 and up. It was designed by アキヒロイトオ (Akihiro Itoh), Daichi Okano, Kwaji, and Kito Shinma and its main mechanics are Team-Based Game, Hidden Roles, and Voting.

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About the game

Do we really have free will? Who decides this? Are we controlled by what we hear and what we see, even while thinking we decide freely? Insider is a game that deals with these questions. While communicating to others, you have to find the right answers to a quiz or find the "insider" who is manipulating the discussion. The insider will do everything to hide their identity while misleading the others. In more detail, players are assigned roles at random. One player is the "master", and they secretly select a word from a set given in a deck of cards. (In a variant given in the rulebook, they can freely select and write down a word.) The "insider" player, whose role is not known to the other players, will then secretly view the word. The rest of the players are known as "commons". The commons then have approximately five minutes in which to ask the master "yes" or "no"-type questions so that they can deduce the secret word. The insider attempts to secretly lead the commons towards the correct word. If the commons fail to guess the correct word, everyone loses. If, however, the word is correctly guessed in the allowable time, the master flips the sand timer, and the commons and master have until the sand runs out to discuss the game and deduce the identity of the insider. If they guess correctly, they win the game together; if they do not, the insider wins.

Questions and answers

Insider supports 4–8 players according to the catalogue. This range comes from the publisher’s listed player count, so the game can be set up for any group size within it. Some setups, rules and scoring details may still vary by player count, so check your edition’s rulebook for the exact configuration.