How to Play Watergate

What is Watergate?

Imagine a tug of war, but instead of a single rope between the two players, you are having to pull multiple ropes. Watergate is this continual tug of war in a nutshell, but how do you play this excellent two player game.

Firstly let us talk about roles, set up and victory in Watergate . In Watergate one player takes the role of the Nixon administration and their role is to bury evidence, stop the Newspaper Editor recruiting informants and try and ensure they gain 5 momentum tokens to have a second term. The other player as the Editor wins if they are able to collect enough evidence to connect 2 informants to Nixon to expose the scandal.

What’s in the box

So for the components, we have a player board, a deck of cards for each player, evidence tokens which need to be placed into the evidence bag, and the informant tokens which need to be placed near each player. Then there are red momentum tokens to track the momentum winner of each round, a white initiative marker to denote who draws an extra card and starts the round first, and an initiative card to be placed between the two players facing the Editor player at the start of the game.

Setup

To set up the game, place the game board between the players and choose your side, collecting all the cards for that player, which will be a 20 card deck and a single card to place your momentum tokens on. Each player shuffles their deck, and the player as the Nixon administration gives the evidence bag a good shake before placing 3 face down pieces of evidence on the 0 space of the research track, along with the momentum and initiative tokens.

The three phases of play

Now to how to play each round! Each round consists of three phases, the initial phase is just where players draw their cards and the Nixon player places three new pieces of facedown evidence on space 0 of the research track. If at this stage your draw deck of cards runs out, draw as many as you can and shuffle the remaining cards to form a new draw deck,

We then move onto the card phase which is where the main bulk of the game happens. Starting with the player with the initiative, players will take it in turn to play and resolve one card at a time until they have no more cards in hand. Each card has two parts, a value part or an action part and you choose one of these two parts to resolve fully. If using the value part you can move evidence, momentum, or initiative along the research track. As the Editor, you can ask the Nixon Administration player if they have any evidence matching the colour on the top of your card, if they do they must reveal 1 piece of facedown evidence and you can move the now face up evidence token that number of spaces towards you on the research track. If they do not have a piece of evidence of that colour, or if you would prefer, you can instead choose to move the initiative or momentum tokens towards you. If at any point a token reaches space 5 on your side of the track, remove it immediately and you will now gain that token as if you had won it at the end of the round, pinning evidence to the board, gaining initiative or adding the momentum token to your player card.

Where the game gets really interesting is when players use cards for the action part rather than the value part. These will contain powerful opportunities to turn the round in your favour, with some being removed from the game after they have been used to do things like recruit informants or block other players actions. Make sure you read cards fully as some will just move to your discard after their action has been completed but some will be removed from the game. Event cards are removed from the game after they have been used, whereas Journalists go to the Editors discard pile and Conspirators go to the Nixon Administration players discard pile.

The final phase is the Evaluation Phase. Firstly any neutral evidence still on the 0 spot is removed from the board and goes back in the bag, you then award the round's initiative token, which if still on 0 goes to the player who did not have initiative that round. Then award the momentum token, which is gained by neither player if a player had gained it earlier in the round by getting it to their space 5 on the research track, or if it remains on space 0. Then return the initiative marker to the 0 space and place a new momentum token there too. Then beginning with the player who has the initiative, pin all gained evidence onto the evidence board with the Editor placing the evidence face up onto a matching colour space and the Nixon Administration placing the evidence face down. Then if no player has won, begin a new round until a player has met their win condition.

Final thoughts and tips

I really love this game, and I think the key strategy for the Editor to win the game is to try and get evidence on to the board early, particularly ensuring you have a path to Nixon before the Nixon Administration can block it, and as the Nixon Administration you want to focus on rushing momentum tokens to claim your victory before the Editor can respond. The game feels like a continual push and pull of tense moves where you’re continually trying to predict what the other player has or is trying to achieve that round so you can block it. To me, it feels well balanced once you know how it plays, with both sides trying to carve out a route to victory. Oh and the rulebook contains a really cool historical summary of Watergate and those involved which really helps add more context and brings the game and theme to life!

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