The trick-taking game Black Spy is a film noir take on Hearts as you want to enlist the best spies you can while avoiding the black spies, who will always turn against you.
Black Spy lasts a number of rounds, with players scoring points each round. The game is played using mostly standard trick-taking rules: Each turn, someone plays a card to the center of the table, then in turn each player lays down (if possible) a card matching the suit or rank of the card led, throwing out any other card otherwise. The highest card in the color led wins the trick, and that player leads the next trick. Points come only from the black cards, with the black spies (yes, "spies", with six black #7 cards) being worth ten points each and all other black cards worth 1-5 points. When someone reaches 200 or more points at the end of a round, the game ends and the player with the lowest score wins.
- Spy theme
- Nice box and card art
- Coasters included
- Black cards (especially sevens) are very bad for scoring
- Spy
- Spy theme
- Hearts
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Hand Management — Players manage their hands to avoid taking points.
- Trick-Taking — A standard trick-taking game where players must follow suit and try to avoid taking undesirable cards.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- hey there I'm Z flinger of zman games
- hey this is uh Robinson cruso
- all right here we got a game of black spy in progress
- all right this is nishima hex 3.0
- all right this is a game of pandemic in progress
- all right this is Tera mystica
- this is a gamer game
References (from this video)
- Will be looking for it
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Oh my god, this has Bladeunner feel with an Arkham Horror twist. if that makes any sense. It feels like the old second edition uh Arkham Hore.
- I just want to get rid of some more stuff that isn't going to sit there, you know, that I'm not going to play.
- You know, once I review it, if I don't think it's going to stay, you know, and not that it's a bad game or anything like that, it just becomes a point where where, you know, at my age, okay, at this ancient ancient age, okay, how many games can you keep?
- I just got a feeling that, you know, everything's, you know, they want to go digital with everything. I mean, what's the point of that?
- I I I I I'm trying to find stuff that I can make consistent fun videos for.
- I try not to be a gosh darn infomercial, okay? I try not I try to separate myself from the rest of the board game industry.
- All I care about is doing my best to try to get, you know, have some fun.
- My whole thing is, okay, it's a Godzilla with big minis. Yeah. If I can get my hands on it, I'll get my hands on it.
- And my plan is to keep going as long as I can physically and mentally and just enjoy myself.
- get back to the way it used to be in 2013, 14, and 15, you know, where we just we had fun.
- And then we just, clean, smart, concise, and just keep it simple.
- The board game geek hall of fame. Holy cow, what a train wreck that thing is.
- You're one of my favorite designers of all time.
- And we're we're making that push to to just have fun and have a good time. And we're getting as far away from stupid stuff as you can imagine.