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Manipulate a kingdom with medieval medicine in social deduction game Four Humours

Universal shelfcare.

Influence a kingdom’s worth of patients by distributing personality potions in upcoming board game Four Humours, inspired by medieval medical practices.

Four Humours is a social deduction game for two to six players based on the healthcare beliefs of medieval Europe. During the Middle Ages, people believed that the human body contained a mixture of four different types of fluids - yellow bile, blood, black bile and phlegm - that would cause illnesses if they ever became unbalanced.

In Four Humours, each of the different fluids represent various personality traits in human beings, with choleric (yellow bile) being associated with ambitiousness, sanguine (blood) equalling social skills, melancholic (black bile) equating to analytical behaviours and phlegmatic (phlegm) relating to peaceful individuals. As apothecaries - or ye olde pharmacists - players will be looking to instill these personality types into their patients in the hopes of gaining the most influence.

Cover image for YouTube video

Players take turns to play a humour token from their hand onto one of the characters in a scene card. Tokens are placed facedown, meaning that the other players cannot tell what kind of humour is being placed on what characters. Each character is only susceptible to two different kinds of humour, which helps to narrow down the possibilities. A total of four scene cards are played every turn; once all the characters on two of the cards have been accounted for, all the tokens are resolved.

If a single choleric token has been played, the player responsible wins that round. If the total number of sanguine tokens on the cards is above the number two, the players behind those win. Should two melancholic tokens have been placed, the players who laid those down are successful. Otherwise, any number of phlegmatic tokens wins the round.

There are also additional paths to victory in Four Humours, as players can pursue various goals throughout the game by playing certain types of tokens on particular map tiles - which happens if certain tokens are moved to different locations at the end of each round. Players can also complete goals on their own individual midday and midnight boards.Whichever player has achieved the most goals by the end of the game is named the winner.

Four Humours board game layout

Four Humours is the debut title from designer Charlie McCarron, who previously assisted in the development of expandable card game Star Wars: Destiny.

Adam’s Apple Games is the publisher behind Four Humours, with the studio’s previous releases being Truck Off: The Food Truck - a board game that has players running their own mobile catering businesses - fantasy-themed game Swordcrafters and startup brewery simulator Brewin’ USA.

The Kickstarter campaign for Four Humours is live until December 5th, with a pledge of $30 (£23) getting backers a copy of the core game set to arrive next August.

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Four Humours

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Alex Meehan avatar

Alex Meehan

Senior Staff Writer

After writing for Kotaku UK, Waypoint and Official Xbox Magazine, Alex became a member of the Dicebreaker editorial family. Having been producing news, features, previews and opinion pieces for Dicebreaker for the past three years, Alex has had plenty of opportunity to indulge in her love of meaty strategy board games and gothic RPGS. Besides writing, Alex appears in Dicebreaker’s D&D actual play series Storybreakers and haunts the occasional stream on the Dicebreaker YouTube channel.

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