Sheriff of Nottingham is a theatrical contraband bluffing game in 45 to 60 minutes for 3 to 5 players. Lying Pirates is a hidden-dice bluffing race in 40 to 60 minutes for 2 to 6 players, with a modular map and an Action card deck. Both are bluffing games. They want very different evenings. Here is the honest comparison.
Key takeaways
| Game | Players | Time | Bluff style | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sheriff of Nottingham | 3 to 5 | 45 to 60 min | Hidden physical bag contents | Theatrical groups who love negotiation and bribery roleplay |
| Lying Pirates: Base Game | 2 to 6 | 40 to 60 min | Hidden-dice probability under a cup | Mixed-experience groups who want bluffing plus a racing arc |
| Lying Pirates: BIG BOX | 2 to 6 | 60 to 75 min | Same as Base, plus Cities of Greed | Premium hosts who want a centerpiece game night |
| Both, owned together | 3 to 5 overlap | Pick by mood | Theatrical vs tactical | Households that play three or more nights a month |
Table of contents
- The 30-second verdict
- How Sheriff of Nottingham actually plays
- How Lying Pirates actually plays
- The bluffing comparison
- When Sheriff of Nottingham wins your evening
- When Lying Pirates wins your evening
- What if you have both
- A designer’s take
- Pick your bluffing game
The 30-second verdict
Pick Sheriff of Nottingham if your group lives for performance. Loud negotiations, bribery roleplay, accusing the merchant across from you of smuggling crossbows under the apples. Three to five players, one consistent evening, a single repeating loop. Words are the engine.
Pick Lying Pirates if your group wants bluffing inside a bigger game. Two to six players, a race around a modular map, hidden-dice bidding, Action cards that change the board, a Final Battle when two ships arrive at port together. Probability sense and table reading are the engines.
Both games will make someone at your table laugh out loud. They will not be laughing at the same thing.
How Sheriff of Nottingham actually plays
Sheriff of Nottingham was designed by Sérgio Halaban and André Zatz and published by Arcane Wonders in 2014. The BGG page is the canonical reference for rules and reviews. The short version of how it plays:
You are a merchant trying to sell goods at the market in Nottingham. Each round, one player takes the role of the Sheriff and the others are merchants. Every merchant fills a small drawstring bag with goods cards. Legal goods like apples, cheese, bread, and chicken are worth less. Contraband like silk, mead, pepper, and crossbows is worth a lot more, and the Sheriff can confiscate it.
After packing your bag, you hand it to the Sheriff and declare aloud what is inside. The declaration has to be a single goods type. “Five apples.” You may be telling the truth. You may be smuggling a single crossbow under four apples and lying about it. You may be telling the truth and pretending to lie about it to bait the Sheriff into wasting an inspection.
The Sheriff then has three options. Wave the bag through. Inspect it. Or accept a bribe to wave it through. Bribes are negotiated openly across the table. “Twenty gold and I let you pass.” “Ten and an apple.” “Thirty if you let everyone else through too.” The negotiation is the heart of the game.
If the Sheriff inspects and the bag matches the declaration, the Sheriff pays a penalty to the merchant. If the inspection reveals contraband or undeclared goods, the merchant pays the Sheriff and loses the contraband. The Sheriff role rotates so everyone takes the chair.
After several rounds, players score their goods, with bonus points for having the most of each legal type. The merchant with the highest total wins.
That is the game. The rules fit on a single sheet. The depth lives in the negotiations.
How Lying Pirates actually plays
Lying Pirates is our game. Founded in 2021 by Lucas Vagner and Mikaela Hård in Stockholm, with lead design by Lucas and the rest of the design team Misha Ahmadi and Max Tideman Ström. Illustrated by Srdjan Vidakovic. Kickstarter launched in 2022. About 16,000 games sold worldwide across five languages. 7.3 on BoardGameGeek across more than 500 reviews. We will keep our description tight and accurate.
You captain a wooden ship racing around a modular map of tiles. First to lap back to the Base tile wins. Each round has three phases: Betting, Sail, Action.
Betting. Every captain fills a wooden cup with their Crew dice plus any Special Crew dice they own. Cover, shake, place down. Peek at your own dice. Going in turn order, each captain bids on the total quantity of a chosen face value across everyone’s cups. “Four threes” means “there are at least four dice showing threes, counting all the cups combined.” Each bid has to climb the previous one in quantity, value, or both. Ones are wild and count as any face value. Instead of raising, you can call “Liar!” on the previous bid, or “Exactly!” to claim the previous bid was precisely correct. All cups come up, the math is checked, the winner is decided.
Sail. The Betting winner gains a coin, takes the Starting Captain token, and rolls the Sail die. Surviving captains move their ships forward by the number rolled. If multiple captains end on the same tile, they battle. The battle winner resolves the tile’s effect. Only one tile resolves per round.
Action. Players can play and buy Action cards. The deck has 71 cards in gold and silver borders, played first-come first-served. They steal coins, sink bids, reshape the map, ambush other captains. Buy more cards by spending two coins.
When a ship reaches the Base tile after a full lap, the game ends. If two or more captains arrive together, the game stops being a race and becomes the Final Battle. Captains trade Special Crew dice and coins for extra Crew dice, then everyone rolls Battle dice in waves. Skull auto-loses. Last captain with a Crew die in their cup wins the whole game.
We covered the deeper history and mechanics of the bidding family in our Liar’s Dice vs Perudo vs Bluff post if you want the 500-year version.
The bluffing comparison
Both games sit in the bluffing family, and reviewers love to put them on the same shelf. Up close, they bluff about different things, resolve in different ways, and reward different skills.
| Dimension | Sheriff of Nottingham | Lying Pirates |
|---|---|---|
| What you bluff about | Hidden physical contents of a goods bag | Hidden-dice probability under your cup |
| The lie | A spoken declaration: “Five apples.” | A bid: “Nine fives.” |
| How the lie resolves | Sheriff inspects, accepts a bribe, or waves you through | Another captain calls “Liar!” or “Exactly!” |
| What skill it rewards | Charisma, negotiation, table-talk, baiting | Probability sense, distribution reading, pressure |
| Information per round | A single declaration plus negotiation | Every previous bid in the chain |
| Failure mode | Caught smuggling, pay the Sheriff | Caught lying, lose the betting round |
| Replay variety | Same loop, fresh personalities | Modular map, 71 Action cards, every game shifts |
The single biggest split is this. Sheriff is a bluff about a thing that physically exists. There is a real crossbow in a real bag or there is not. Once the Sheriff opens the bag, the truth is unambiguous. Lying Pirates is a bluff about a probability that exists under multiple cups at once. The truth is statistical until everyone reveals.
That difference shapes everything else. Sheriff rewards the player who can sell a story. Lying Pirates rewards the player who can price a story.
The Sheriff asks, what is this person willing to swear to? Lying Pirates asks, what are the odds this person is right?
When Sheriff of Nottingham wins your evening
Pick Sheriff when:
- You have three to five players who all like to talk.
- The group enjoys negotiation for its own sake. Bribery is half the game, and a group that hates haggling will hate the loop.
- You want a consistent 45 to 60 minute experience with a single repeating beat.
- The players you have love performance. Sheriff rewards the captain across the table who can keep a straight face while smuggling six crossbows under a single apple.
- You want a wordy game. Sheriff is a conversation. Quiet groups underperform here.
- You like light strategy with heavy social load. The math is simple. The reading of faces and voices is not.
Sheriff is, by some distance, one of the best 45-minute negotiation games of the last decade. The Wikipedia article on the game is a fair primer if you want a neutral take. We respect what Halaban and Zatz built there. We would also tell you, honestly, that it is not the same game we wanted to design.
When Lying Pirates wins your evening
Pick Lying Pirates when:
- You have two to six players. (Sheriff caps at five. We start at two with our Phantom Mode and scale up to six.)
- Your group wants more game per evening. A bluffing core, plus a racing arc, plus 71 Action cards, plus tiles you can re-arrange.
- The players have mixed experience. Lying Pirates teaches the bluffing layer in 90 seconds, and the racing layer reveals itself in the first round. Sheriff has a flatter learning curve but a thinner ceiling.
- You want the bluff to be anchored to math, not theater. Some groups find this more honest. Some find it less fun. You know your group.
- You are hosting a premium game night. The BIG BOX is built to look right on the table. Bamboo cups, metal coins, Cities of Greed mixed in.
- You want a game where the bluff is one weapon among several. Action cards, battles, Special Crew dice, the Final Battle. Bluffing is the spine, not the whole skeleton.
What if you have both
They are complementary, not competitive. We have heard from more than a few customers who own both.
Sheriff is a dinner-party game. It plays brilliantly with a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and it never overstays its welcome. The 45 to 60 minute window matches how long most adults will sit at a table before the conversation drifts somewhere else. Bring it out when the group is more interested in each other than in winning.
Lying Pirates is a dedicated game night. It rewards the table that wants the evening to belong to the game. Three to four plays in, the table reading layer starts to bite, and the Action cards begin to feel less like surprises and more like a hand you are building toward something. Bring it out when the group has booked the night.
If you only have shelf space for one bluffing game, the choice depends on your friends. If your friends are the kind who quote Sheriff to each other at dinner six months later, that is the right game for them. If your friends remember specific bids and specific Final Battles, that is us.
🦜 Polly squawks: If you have both, alternate them. Sheriff loosens the table. Lying Pirates tightens it. Run a Sheriff game first to warm everyone up, then break out the cups when the lying gets serious.
A designer’s take
We made Lying Pirates. We respect Sheriff. It would be silly for us to pretend Sheriff is the wrong choice for the groups it serves. It is one of the best at what it does.
The choice between these two games is really a choice about what the word bluffing means to your group. If bluffing to you is a person looking another person in the eye and saying something they both know might not be true, Sheriff is your game. The whole evening is the dance between what I said, what you believe, and what we are willing to settle for. The math is light. The social weight is everything.
If bluffing to you is the moment a captain raises a bid past where the probabilities say is safe, and the next player has to decide whether to call or push it higher still, Lying Pirates is your game. The math is real. Reading the table is layered on top. The lie is anchored to something you can almost compute, which is what makes the moment of the call feel earned.
We wrote the Liar’s Dice family history post for the deeper version of where our bidding mechanic comes from. We wrote what kind of board gamer are you for the bigger question of how to match a game to a group. And we wrote what makes a board game thematic for the design philosophy that put us in this corner of the hobby in the first place.
If our corner is not your corner, take Sheriff to your next dinner party with our blessing. If our corner is your corner, the rest of the post is for you.
Pick your bluffing game
Three places to start, depending on what you want from the evening.
Base Game
The bluffing-and-racing entry point. 2 to 6 players, 40 to 60 minutes, taught in 90 seconds.
€40 inc VAT
Deluxe BIG BOX
Base Game plus Cities of Greed plus bamboo cups, metal coins, sleeves. The collector edition.
€125 inc VAT
Cities of Greed
Expansion. Adds City Cards, Influence Cards, and the Mayor die. The political layer on top of the piracy.
€30 inc VAT