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You are a spymaster. Your mission: Dominate the world of undercover intelligence by deploying agents to complete vital missions. To complete your mission, you must first build an underground network of highly trained agents from different branches of espionage.
In the card game SpyNet, two to four players work alone or with a teammate to gather the information they need to recruit the best agents and disrupt their opponents' plans. With clever play and careful coordination, you can rise to the top of the intelligence community and become a dominant force in the world of covert espionage.
In more detail, the deck contains agents, funding, and missions. Players draft cards from a face-down line-up: Look at the first pile and take it or put it back in order to look at the second pile; look at the second pile, etc. After you take a pile, you add one card to empty spot in the line-up as well as each pile that you passed over, thereby enriching the haul for the next player.
Players lay down color-coded agents in order to gain strength in four fields: tech, infiltration, counterespionage, and enforcement. Funding can be applied to any agent, and some agents have special powers that take effect when played. A player can complete a mission only when their strength in that mission's field is stronger than all other opponents.
- Redesigned the entire game based on the new flavor
- Very close to the original mechanics
- Asian warriors
- Sprytet
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- If there was a Mount Rushmore of game designers he'd be on it, Mr. Richard Garfield.
- Well, the uh the original inspiration I was walking uh around Portland and saw some birds uh seagulls jockeying for posts and uh I began to um fantasize that uh that the birds were choosing the better posts and uh acquiring them based on the pecking order because one would fly up and either be pushed off or manage to take the post they were trying to land on.
- And uh I thought it might be an interesting opportunity to make a game like Strateggo, but only one person showed uh showed their piece and the other one said who won, thereby keeping some of the the mystery in the game and uh that's what I applied to this idea of pecking order.
- You kind of like take something that's typically done and you completely turn it on its head.
- I try a lot and uh and uh many many don't make it past uh casual play.
- In my opinion, there's been some recent good examples of what to do with the reprint.
- I don't typically do a lot of negative reviews. That game got a negative review for me.
- I feel like publishers try to do too much. I feel like they don't listen to what the people actually want.
- Old games uh games in general when they reach a certain quality level just stand up to a lifetime of replay and they there's no logical reason why they should expire.
- It's not that I don't care about themes. I do. Um I I don't uh but but I I I want them to resonate with whatever the mechanics are.
- I totally approve of that as a as as a way to play. That's the way I play. I find it very enjoyable to have those deductions on the table rather than to have to memorize them.
- The game the game worked really well, but it was positioned as sort of a heavier game than it should have been. It came in a in a bigger box than it needed to.
- With uh Spyet, I actually presented they they said they wanted to uh with Shadow Blades, they wanted to change the flavor to being uh instead of spies sort of set in a modern context, they changed it to uh Asian warriors uh Korean Asian warriors. And I I actually redesigned the entire game based on that.
- With uh Vanguard Exiles? It's on Steam with uh as in early release, so there's a long way to go, but uh but you can play head-to-head.
- I've tried to make auto battlers myself. Uh and uh they always felt when when I was working on them, they always felt like uh I I I they always stalled at this point where I said, "Oh, this is kind of fun, but you know what? It would be better on computer."
- Recently I played uh zombie kids with uh with my seven-year-old twins. And and this worked this worked really well is getting a legacy experience which was a you know which which worked for that age was marvelous.