First Impressions
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
Except in 23 Knives, you are not really here to bury Caesar.
You are here to decide whether he gets buried at all.
First Impressions
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
Except in 23 Knives, you are not really here to bury Caesar.
You are here to decide whether he gets buried at all.
My interest in Roman history probably started in two very different places. The first was Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, which introduced me to the Roman side of the mythological world. The second was school, where Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was required reading. We even had a school play based on it, and I played Mark Antony, which means I still know far too much of his speech by heart.
So yes, a game about the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar was always going to have my attention.
What surprised me was how well 23 Knives turns that historical moment into a game. A properly gamified system of shifting loyalty, public persuasion, private manipulation, and spectacularly bad faith politics.
In other words, Rome.
The Shape of the Conspiracy
23 Knives is a hidden allegiance game, but I would not call it a straightforward social deduction game. That label feels slightly too small.
At the start, each player is dealt two Citizen cards and chooses one to keep. Your Citizen gives you your starting allegiance. You might be a Loyalist trying to save Caesar, a Liberator trying to kill him, or an Opportunist waiting for the right moment to swing history in the opposite direction.
But the clever part is that your allegiance is not fixed.
Throughout the game, players can place Sway cards into each other’s tableaus. These can push someone toward Loyalty, Liberation, or a perfect balance that turns them into an Opportunist. So you are not merely trying to guess what other players are. You are actively trying to change what they are.
That is the hook.
23 Knives is about reading the table while everyone is actively rewriting the table.
How Caesar Lives or Dies
The central objective is very clean.
Fate cards are played into the Forum and eventually move into the Curia. Knives count toward Caesar’s death. Doves pull the total back toward his survival. At the end of the game, if the final total is 23 or more Knives, Caesar dies. If it is below 23, Caesar lives.
If Caesar dies, the strongest Liberator wins (Liberator with the most blood spots in their tableau). If Caesar lives, the strongest Loyalist wins (Most laurel wreaths in their tableau).
That last bit matters.
You may want your side to succeed, but you do not necessarily want your allies to succeed too much. If another Loyalist is clearly more dedicated to Caesar than you are, saving Caesar may simply hand them the game. If another Liberator is stacked with Blood, killing Caesar might win them the game instead.
So even when people are technically on the same side, there is always a knife pointed sideways.
And then there are the Opportunists.
Opportunists win as a team if, at the end of the game, they can collectively play cards from their hands to change Caesar’s fate. If Caesar would live, they need to kill him. If he would die, they need to save him.
It is such a good role because it makes the final reveal feel dangerous until the very last second. You are never only worried about whether Caesar lives or dies. You are worried about who has been quietly preparing to make that result absolutely meaningless.
My Mark Antony Problem
Ironically, in my first game, I drew Mark Antony.
That felt almost too perfect.
His card starts you off in a very strong Loyalist position, so naturally I began the game trying to become the biggest Loyalist at the table. Very “noble and principled”.
Then the Liberators noticed.
Two of them figured out I was probably a Loyalist and started Swaying me hard toward the Liberator side. I could have spent actions trying to burn those cards away and drag myself back to my original allegiance, but the other Loyalist at the table was already ahead of me. Even if Caesar lived, I probably was not winning.
So I did what any honourable Roman citizen would do.
I abandoned principle and became an Opportunist.
That is where 23 Knives really clicked for me. The game rewards flexibility. If you sit there thinking, “I am a Loyalist and I must remain a Loyalist,” you are going to have a bad time. Your allegiance is a battlefield. Sometimes the best move is not to resist the way the table is changing you, but to use it.
So I leaned into the pivot.
The Liberators were behind because they had spent so much effort Swaying me instead of pushing enough Knives into the Curia. I started visiting the Forum and playing Knives myself, not because I wanted the Liberators to win, but because I needed the final count to land close enough for the Opportunists to flip it at the end.
For a while, it was working beautifully.
The Near Perfect Betrayal
The funniest part is that the Liberators could see me playing cards into my own tableau.
They assumed I was building up to become a huge Liberator because they had already pushed so much Blood onto me. What I was actually doing was balancing myself into Opportunist territory.
That misunderstanding lost me the game.
In the final round, everything went wrong.
We were already on the black end of the Kalends track, where exile is usually restricted, but an Issue card came up that allowed an exile vote even that late. The Liberators panicked and convinced the table that I was an even bigger Liberator than they were. They made me sound like the real threat.
And it worked.
I got exiled, thus I had to replace my citizen card. I ended up drawing a Liberator card converting my opportunist position to that of a weak Liberator.
The worst part is that one of the deciding votes came from an Opportunist. I knew they were an Opportunist, but they did not know I had pivoted to their side. If I had done a better job of convincing them, we might have pulled it off.
At the final reveal, the total came to 17 Knives.
The remaining Opportunists had 5 Knives in hand.
They were exactly one short.
I had 4 Knives in hand that could have been played, had I remained an Opportunist.
That is the kind of loss that makes you stare at the table for a few seconds and quietly replay every conversation that led to your downfall.
Which, to be clear, is a compliment.
Swaying Rome
The Sway mechanic is easily my favourite part of 23 Knives.
It gives the game a very different texture from something like Secret Hitler. In Secret Hitler, you are mostly trying to deduce fixed roles through voting patterns and table behaviour. In 23 Knives, you are still
reading people, but you also have agency over their alignment. You can push them, weaken them, confuse them, or accidentally create a monster.
It is a social manipulation game more than a pure social deduction game.
The game is not only asking you to lie well. It is asking you to adapt well. You have to watch what people are doing, track what they might be hiding, decide who is useful to you, and work out whether your own position has changed so much that your original plan no longer makes sense.
That fluidity is brilliant.
It can also feel mean.
If multiple players start Swaying you, it can feel like your plans are being taken away from you. But I think the key is to not treat your initial allegiance as a personal identity. You may start as a Loyalist, but victory at any cost is the spirit of the thing. If Rome pushes you toward another path, maybe Rome has given you a better one.
This is not a game for players who hate being messed with.
The Table It Wants
We played at six players, and that felt like a very strong count.
Honestly, I suspect five to six players is where 23 Knives is at its best. With fewer players, I can imagine the game becoming more predictable and less tangled. With more, it probably becomes more chaotic and drawn out. Your mileage will vary depending on the group, but six gave us enough uncertainty, table talk, and shifting suspicion without completely losing control.
The game does take a little time to teach.
My teach took around 30 minutes, though I should say I tend to teach every little rule, edge case, and possible exception like I am preparing people for a board game viva. So that number is probably a bit inflated.
The rulebook itself is excellent. Clear, well organised, and easy to follow. I had no real complaints there.
There was some mild initial confusion around the names, though.
“Loyalist” and “Liberator” both sound good in different ways. They are not as instantly black-and-white as something like Fascist and Liberal in Secret Hitler. It took a little getting used to, but once the game got going, the language became natural.
Pacing and Flow
The first game can feel slightly drawn out, especially in the second half.
Part of that is normal first-play friction. People are checking reference cards, remembering what each location does, and trying to understand how much information they actually have. But 23 Knives is also a game where your turn can look deceptively small.
You move to a location.
You resolve its action.
You maybe Sway someone.
That can seem like very little if you are only paying attention to your own turn.
But that is not really how the game is meant to be played. You should be watching everyone’s turn. Who is going to the Forum? Who is drawing Sway? Who is revealing cards? Who is trying too hard to look harmless? Who suddenly wants someone exiled?
The game lives in the spaces between turns.
Your actual turn is just the moment where you try to execute the one perfect action based on everything you have been watching.
The Issue cards help keep things moving too. They introduce votes, shake up the board state, reveal information, and sometimes advance the Kalends track. That matters because the game needs that sense of history marching forward. Without it, the middle could easily become too loose. With it, there is always some pressure pushing the table toward the end.
Components and Presentation
I really like the production here.
It is not overproduced. The components are simple, elegant, and very fitting for the theme. You feel like you are paying for what you get.
The cards have a clean white design with simple iconography that works well. The Citizen cards use historical imagery like busts, statues, and coins, and the rulebook even notes that some historical figures do not have surviving representations, so the game uses Roman objects and symbols to represent them. That is a lovely touch.
The historical text on the Citizen cards is also excellent. It gives the game texture without turning it into a lecture. You get enough flavour to feel the people behind the conspiracy, but not so much that the game stops to become a history textbook.
The board is also very well done. Clear icons, restrained colours, and a visual style that feels Roman without becoming cluttered.
The Kalends track and Curia are especially pretty once assembled. They use locking cardboard pieces, and they are very serviceable. My one concern is longevity. With repeated plays, I can imagine those pieces weakening over time. Personally, I would probably glue the pieces together after the first assembly, while still keeping the Kalends and Curia separate so everything fits back in the box.
I may even look into a 3D printed replacement at some point.
One Small Production Miss
My only real component gripe is the lack of a first player token and Tribune tracker.
Normally, I do not care much about first player tokens. Half the time they sit on the table being ignored while everyone remembers turn order anyway. But in 23 Knives, the first player rotation and Tribune rotation move in opposite directions. The Tribune resolves Issue votes at the end of their turn, and while that is easy enough at the start, it becomes surprisingly easy to forget once the rhythm of the game shifts.
A simple marker for first player and another for Tribune would have helped a lot.
It is an easy fix at home, but it stood out because the rest of the production is so clean and thoughtful.
Who Is This For?
23 Knives is absolutely not for newer gamers looking for “something like Secret Hitler.”
It shares some bones with games like that, sure. Hidden allegiances. Voting. Lies. Accusations. People pretending they are definitely helping. But this is much more involved. It has more strategy, more agency, and more moving parts.
This is for Secret Hitler players who want something deeper.
It is also for strategy gamers who want a game with a lot of player interaction and a real social manipulation layer. If your group enjoys messing with each other’s plans, reading incentives, pivoting tactics, and playing to win even when the game has dragged your allegiance through the mud, 23 Knives has a lot to offer.
But if your group wants a light party deduction game, this is definitely not it.
And if players get frustrated when their plan is disrupted, when their role changes, or when other people keep interfering with their tableau, this may feel too mean.
My group tends to enjoy games where ruining someone’s elegant plan is part of the fun.
23 Knives understands that impulse very well.
Final Verdict
23 Knives is a sharp, clever, and surprisingly strategic game of Roman social manipulation.
Its best idea is the instability of allegiance. You are not locked into one side from the start. You are constantly being pushed, pulled, weakened, strengthened, exposed, and misunderstood. That makes the game feel alive in a way many hidden role games do not.
It also gives players real agency. You are gathering information, influencing allegiances, manipulating Caesar’s fate, calling votes, resisting exile, and deciding whether your original plan still deserves your loyalty.
That is very Roman.
The game is not perfect. It can run a little long on a first play, the Sway mechanic may feel mean to some players, and it really wants a group willing to lean into suspicion and table talk. I also wish it had included clearer tracking tokens for first player and Tribune.
But none of that dulls the knife too much.
At its best, 23 Knives creates exactly the kind of moments I want from a game about Caesar’s assassination: false alliances, public accusations, private pivots, and one agonising final reveal where victory is potentially decided by a single Knife.
That is hard to forget.
I give this game a solid 8/10.
Zatu Review Summary
Score Zatu
80%
