Board Game Review - Good Cop, Bad Cop (third edition)

Good Cop, Bad Cop is a great team based social deduction game. In each game, players are randomly dealt 3 facedown cards which will determine whether the player is a (as you may have guessed from the title) a Good Cop or a Bad Cop. Each turn, a player may Investigate another player (by looking at one of their 3 facedown cards), pick up some equipment or even a gun, or Shoot a gun they picked up earlier.

The goal is to eliminate the leader of your opposing team. At the onset of the game, you don't know who is on your team so you need to rely on social manipulation and table talk to try and form alliances and determine who you can trust and who may be scheming to take you down. Some of the equipment you pick up can help expose team members, but if you accidentally reveal the leader of your own team then the opposing team will be able to quickly target and eliminate that player.

If you've played games like Mafia or Werewolf, you will find familiar elements here. I like the interesting twists added by the equipment cards that can give you a special advantage or even cause a little chaos by manipulating the identity cards (which could result in a person becoming a member of a different team).

Even though it has player elimination, each game goes fairly quickly so there won't be a lot of downtime for players eliminated early on. There are even some equipment cards that can 'revive' a previously eliminated player to get them back in the game.

Comparing to Werewolf I do wish that there were some custom roles or abilities that are assigned to specific identities but I acknowledge that would add some complexity that may be over the top for this game. I know there were some expansions to earlier versions of the game so it's possible that some of those expansions did introduce roles. I also know that Pull the Pin Games is about to announce an expansion to this printing to bring together all previous content so that may add in additional roles and items.

The biggest downside I see is that the game only plays up to 8 players but honestly if you added too many more players, the play time would start to drag on and people could get bored in between turns so it's probably a pretty good sweet spot right now.


As it stands, Good Cop, Bad Cop is a fun Social Deduction game to get friends to playfully lie and manipulate one another in an effort to discover hidden hidden alliances and shoot their friends. Next time you want to spice up game night with a little social craziness, this is a game worth checking out.


4 out of 5 stars