Your success with Rosalind will depend on your ability to act with bravery and your ability to pivot at a moment’s notice. Do you have what it takes to win?
Cheat Sheet
Try to help an assassin get an early win, even if it’s under the guise of preventing a Rosalind win.
Once the first captain has died, try to win with a captain like Lady Macbeth or Prospero by declaring that you can win together. Declaring your own identity might be a risk, but it might also pay off.
If all else is going to fail, try to work with other ally captains or just stall out with chaos and healing permits until end of round 7.
Sometimes it’s definitely the right call to declare that you’re Rosalind if someone is really close to winning. If captains don’t have faith that they can win before round 8, pretend to be another captain like Puck or Iago instead.
Everyone’s Favourite Squid
Rosalind hails from the abyssal depths and seeks to initiate a kind of Synchronization event. It’s hard to translate exactly what that means into English, but speaking in terms of gameplay, it means Rosalind is capable of winning the game with the vast majority of captains at the table.
The only exceptions are Domination captains like Titus, Richard, and Romeo/Juliet (outside of a few specific circumstances). But for the most part, Rosalind (kind of) wins whenever anyone else at the table wins. So, that should make things really easy, right?
Well… if you’ve played Rosalind before, you’ve probably found the opposite to be the case.
Rosalind’s playstyle heavily depends on what the most successful captain at the table is trying to accomplish. She has to be forceful enough to orchestrate a shared victory, yet flexible enough to steer things in a new direction if her first shot wasn’t successful.
Every missed opportunity forces Rosalind into an increasingly difficult position - if you want to be skillful with Rosalind, you have to figure out which strategy to commit to, because ensuring one type of victory will make it hard to achieve other types of victory.
The main problem you must grapple with is violence: you lose as soon as a second captain has been murdered. Rosalind can tolerate one captain death, especially if it feels like it may trigger a Synchronization.
But once a captain dies without resolution, Rosalind steadfastly refuses to allow for any more unnecessary bloodshed. That means while she can ally with assassins like Hamlet/Portia/Othello/Brutus, that alliance can be quite fleeting. So should you try to win with an assassin or instead ditch that plan and try to win with somebody else?
Well… there’s a lot to unravel here, so let’s back up a bit and start from the top. A good way to start looking at Rosalind from a better perspective is to compare her to other ally captains:
Iago
Can win with lots of different captains - orchestrate freely as long as you have blood
Once you’ve convinced people you’re Iago, you’re almost guaranteed to win
Other captains have an interest in impersonating you
Little agency over your actions (e.g. must attack every second turn to keep up blood) - most agency comes from what you say, not what you do
Portia wants you dead
Cordelia
Has no agency regarding which captain to help (chooses the player, but not the captain)
Can win while dead
Loyalty token might draw unwanted attention
Loyalty token sometimes draws fear (ironically, fear of Brutus makes it easier to protect your marked target)
Puck
Only needs to be alive, doesn’t need to personally “do” things necessarily to win
Only able to win in endgame, far long after most captains’ ideal windows of opportunity
Must understand everyone enough to sabotage them
Annoying people too much can get you killed
Imogen
Can win at almost any point in the game
Can be tricked into revealing for no reason and dying
Set up assassins for an easier victory, even if you don’t know the specific target
Doesn’t pair as well with Prospero or Lady Macbeth
Needs a minimum amount of health before revealing - self-care required
Looks an awful lot like Prospero before revealing
Rosalind
Can win at any point in the game
Your round-8 win condition incites more aggression than usual
Increased aggression (due to your round-8 win condition) makes allying with assassins just a little easier than normal
Since you don’t need minimum energy or blood to win, you can easily pivot to help people like Prospero or Lady Macbeth at a moment’s notice
Each phase of the game calls for a totally different approach to winning
Must earn the trust of different captains depending on when you want to try and win
With these pros and cons in perspective with other ally captains, we can have 2 summary tips for Rosalind:
1) Practice redirecting the behaviour of the table from one goal to another (e.g. from “kill the person who seems like Mercutio” to “go for the Reveal since you’ll have Iago and I helping you”)
2) It’s risky to go all-in to winning with one type of captain. Try to have one plan for before the first captain dies, and another plan for after that.
So what are some example plans?
Plan A - Assassin Pairing
If it only takes one kill to bring about Synchronization, then perhaps it shall be done. Assassin pairings are deceptively difficult - even if you’re the one marked for death - because any captain with energy can easily shield even a well-planned killing blow. Assassination victories are harder to co-ordinate out loud than many other types due to the finesse required in ensuring exactly the right person lands that final attack.
Therefore, to pair with an assassin, you may need to be a bit more cryptic with your messages. You may also need to declare that you’re Rosalind outright, even if that makes you an enemy of a few other people - at least this way, the assassin doesn’t have to reveal themselves but can (kind of) trust you to not interfere with their plans.
Read up on body language
Read the actions, facial expressions and sentence structure of other captains at the table to snuff out the assassin characters. Who seems to feign disinsterest in the fate of someone else? Who seems to pivot into suddenly wanting one specific person very close to death? If you notice any particular captain suddenly growing cold when a fatal Barrage is levied against someone else, that may be your queue to deploy a shield and give them a chance to land the final blow themselves.
Similar to Cordelia, you basically need to help an assassin get their kill without making it obvious enough for other people to shield. That requires recognizing somebody’s identity as one when nobody else has, and then keeping somewhat quiet about it. The tough part is signalling to the assassin that you’re here to help without signalling to everyone else who that specific assassin is.
Plan B - Ascension Pairing
While you can totally plan to ally with an ascender (e.g. Prospero, Lady Macbeth) from round 1, it’s unlikely to be a great first pick.
Why? Because ascenders almost never win before the first death. The odds are pretty low that all players at the table will be pacifist, unless it’s everyone’s first game - a lot of captains need blood and death even without ascenders, and past that, the socially acceptable justification for attacking another player is to say “They might be Prospero/Lady Macbeth”.
That basically means your Ascension captains won’t be thrilled to Reveal when so many other people are alive, because early on everyone will be prepared to kill any ascender at a moment’s notice. Even if you say “Oh I’m Rosalind so I’ll protect you”, that’s not the most trustworthy option possible, and even mentioning that you might help an ascender is going to make everyone else even more aggressive at keeping each other’s health low.
There’s no rush
Conversely, if you wait until after the first death for an Ascension pairing (or at least, wait until you’ve secured some kind of plan A gambit for an assassin-based victory) then that’s one fewer captain to Barrage any potential Lady Macbeths and/or Prosperos. Even better if the first captain to die was not Iago - you might be able to form a 3-person alliance!
Plan C - Ally Pairing / Stalling
The whole “You win at the end of round 7” thing scares a lot of people into attacking each other, and this is why Rosalind is difficult at all. Ironically, her auto-win effect makes it quite difficult to pull off this type of victory.
New Rosalind players often make the mistake of attempting to stall the game from the very beginning. (We’ve tried making her a stall-only captain and found it nearly impossible. That’s why we changed her win condition! :))
Stalling to the end of round 7 works as a last-resort strategy, one that players may always fall back to - but trying too hard to stall from the beginning may cue in a certain fearful bloodlust to earn those extra 5 rounds of gameplay.
Basically, from the very start of the game, players are scared of a premature ending snuffing their victory - and the omnipresence of Puck means that declining an alliance with you doesn’t really deny them an ally in the long run (i.e. they can always wait until round 12 if they feel they need an ally).
So you can’t exactly leverage the “Win with me because I’ll be your ally” card with 100% perfection, just because captains are free to stick around for Puck instead if they want.
Additionally, some of the “We have to stop Rosalind” bloodlust is fabricated; often, such sentiments come from Pucks and Richards and Romeos and Juliets, wielding fear to fuel their own chaos. This means you can’t quietly hope that people will forget about Rosalind’s win condition for 7 rounds - at some point, you have to find a way to address those concerns head-on.
Ally with allies
One way to cruise through round 7 is to be frank with captains like Iago (or Imogen if you’re breaking the suggested captain pool) and try to arrange a mutual stall loop for round 7. Note that you can’t work with Puck, so don’t try offering any alliance with that little fellow.
Oh yeah there are permits too
Another way to stall is the brute force of Shields and Fortifies, though typically Barrages will win out with regards to damage vs healing throughput. So you can stall for a bit of time, but eventually, you’ll start to lose ground at the 3-blood mark (and with multiple captains attacking somebody) vs your single Fortify/Shield.
If you can’t beat Puck, be Puck
The final way is to take a note from Puck’s book and cause a little chaos. This can lead captains into disarray and make it impossible to complete objectives or even murder each other in a timely fashion.
If you can throw off the math of things like Barrages with well-timed bluff calls, you can sometimes make it impossible energy-wise to leverage energy into damage in time for round 7. (a Drain and Shield combo also work wonders for wasting captain turns.)
Perhaps instead of roleplaying as Rosalind, you roleplay as Puck - acting as though you want to stall out the game for a while, acting apathetic to the first captain death, and hoping the table announces the equivalent of “Huh, I guess Rosalind’s probably not in the game.”
Of course, anyone else who’s read this guide will now mistrust that approach so oops.
Be flexible, be influential
Overall, as Rosalind you have an intruiging handful of strategies at your disposal depending on who you want to team up with (or whether you want to team up at all). Rosalind is a tricky captain because she needs to determine the win conditions of other captains before anyone else, and help those captains win without it looking suspicious. Additionally, depending on the captain she’s trying to help, she’ll need to encourage totally different moodsets at the table from a violent one to a healthy one to a kind of energy-starved one.
To win, you must think flexibly, and you must practice your ability to really understand the motivations behind each player’s actions - so that you can nudge them towards a victory that works with you. How can you help? Or, if it’s too late to team up, how can you stop them? Rosalind can win in many ways, but none of the individual paths are easy to tread - not alone. Find a way to earn the trust of the captains around you and light a path together!
