SpyTails Preview | What Happens When Trick-Taking Meets Deck Building?
Transcript
Spy Tales Tactics in the Shadows is an upcoming trick taker that adds deck building elements. But how does that even work? I'm Dr. Brian McDonald. This is Brains on Games. Let's talk all about Spy Tales: Tactics in the Shadows from Moumo.
Spy Tales is a light game. Uh it's a game for between two and four players. is it plays best at four and you can play it as a four player free-for-all or play it in teams of two. Games take only about 45 to 90 minutes to play and this is one that kids aged 10 and up can figure out what you're trying to do in this trick taking game is to finish five or six rounds depending on the player count and and be the player who has the most influence at the end of the game. How do you earn that influence? Well, really it's by forecasting the number of operations or tricks you're going to win. So, you're going to have a hand of seven cards. There are seven tricks per round. I'm going to use traditional trick taking language here rather than operations and etc., etc., just because it's easier for me to keep that straight in my head. But what you're trying to do here is bid on the number of tricks you're going to win. Oh, if I'm confident that I can win two, I'm going to spend three of my influence to do that. If I win two tricks, then I'm going to earn that influence back. I'll get the influence that I bid plus an equal number of influence tokens from the bank, and I'm going to continue doing that over several rounds. If I'm incorrect, if I'm not able to win those two hands, well, then I lose that influence, and it's back to the drawing board in the next round. You might also be able to earn some influence by accomplishing missions. So, at the beginning of each round, before anybody plays any cards, you're going to deal
out three cards from this deck above these three uh reward icons. Some of these are missions. Some are just new rules for that round. So, sometimes, oh, the it's the low cards that will win a trick instead of the high cards. Sometimes it's if you earn if you win three tricks, you could get these two extra influence at the end of the round. So, those three events or missions will make each round unique. And the other things that really make this thing unique. Well, first of all, I mean, you've got great artwork on these cards. I do quite like the style that they've chosen here, but each player is going to have a deck of these. You can see in the bottom right hand corner there's a little icon that shows that this is the blue player's deck. Uh, your deck is three suits of cards. You're starting with the number four and it goes up to 10. But that's where the deck building comes in. Players are going to start with the hand of seven cards. So you draw seven cards from your deck. Each player has their own deck. Remember, because it is a deck builder, too.
You're going to be playing through seven hands because everybody's playing with their own deck. There might be ties. You know, I could play a green five and another player later on can play a green five. As the first card played is going to win in the event of a tie. The player who leads, the player who plays the first card into the trick, if you have a card in that color, you have to play it. There are some little wrinkles here that I'll tell you about, though. The first complication is that each of these meuples, each player has a unique ability. Now, most of the time they can only use that ability once per round. Meaning that, you know, you've got your hand of seven cards when that that's the round uh the next round starts once everybody's played those seven tricks. And for most of these characters, you're going to flip over your power token to show that it's been used. Now, Alka over here has a persistent ability that allows him to draw an extra card every time he draws a card. So, he doesn't have to flip his token, but all of the other ones do, and it says so on their player board, so it's easy to remember what your character can do. Ekko can take a card from their discard pile and play that into a suit. Mirage is one who can designate any once per round can designate any card they want as a card of the lead suit. And over here, mimic can do almost the same thing except that mimic can designate a card as the intimidation suit, meaning that card is
going to be trump for that round for that hand. Players also have two other tokens that they can use once per round, and these are really important. You've got this little red flag over here. This is reinforcements. So if I flip this over at any time during the round, I can discard however many cards I want from my hand and redraw from the deck. So if I don't like my hand based on my predictions here, I can take a chance and draw some different cards from the deck. The ghost token here is one that's really important. cost you an influence to play this one, but it allows you to pass so that you don't play a card into the hand. That can allow you to save a card or it can prevent you from from missing your bid, for example, if you're going to win an extra hand and you couldn't get out of it. But you can only use this once cuz you're flipping over the token after you use it. Before the beginning of the next round, all of those tokens flip back over again so that you can use them again later on. But as I said, once per round is the limit there. When the round is done, the player who wins the last trick, who wins the final hand of the round, gets to be the first to go to the marketplace and draft a card. You can take any one of these that you want to. Maybe you want to take skunk bomb.
Some of these don't have a suit, but they have a special power. Skunk bomb is a very powerful one where you're just going to stop a suit in its tracks so that nobody wins it. This can really mess with your opponent's plans for sure or again prevent you from winning a trick when you don't want to win it. Shrew is a low card and it forces the winner of that trick to lose an influence token. So these things have different powers. The high cards, the face cards are in this deck as well. So agent Q, for example, allows you to draw an extra card if you win with that and it counts as a 12. So everything is is detailed at the bottom of those cards. So, it's easy to remember everything because the marketplace is where all the trump cards are. Uh, you're not going to have any trumps in the first round of the game because you haven't gone to the marketplace yet. But once you played that final hand, the winner of the final hand drafts first and you go around the circle twice. So, you're going to wind up being able to add two cards to your deck. Optionally, you can also discard to a card for each one that you take. So you might grab one so nobody else gets it and discard that exact one if you want to. So it's uh that's where the deck building comes in. Then the next round is going to start. You're going to shuffle all of your cards back together again and draw that seven card hand.
What skills though are you practicing when you play a game like Spy Tales? Uh well I mean like most trick takers memory of the cards that have been played is important. So, if you can keep track of who's played their yellow 10, then that's very good information for you when you're trying to win your bid or lose your bid. If you can keep track of who no longer has blue cards in their hand, that gives you some good information that's going to be helpful for you. If you can keep track of and remember who drafted the skunk bomb so that you know, oh, the next player could blow this whole thing up and I'm not going to win the hand. Maybe you want to wait until you've you're playing a hand where your turn is after that player so that you know that you've got a chance to win it. Um, so memory is very very important in trick- taking games. And even though each player has their own deck, it's still important in Spy Tales.
Final thoughts though about Spy Tales. Well, this is a game where you've got these great handmade characters. I mean, there's there's no reason really to make these as fancy as they are, except Mokuo. They do love to have games that can be also used as decorations in your house. Now, am I going to put these little guys on? I might put these little guys on the shelf. I do quite like them. And they are all handmade. The card art is great. Like I said, I really do like the style that they're using here. I think it's fun. And the com the combination of trick taking and deck building is really unique. I haven't played a game like this before and I wasn't sure if I would really enjoy it because the card counting is so different when each player has their own deck. But we all had a good time playing this game. We like the unique player powers. That ability that you can withdraw from a trick and just pass, but you can only do that once per round makes some of these decisions interesting. The option to discard cards and redraw is great. The missions and the events that change things up, those things are fun, too.
So, we did quite like the game. Now, this is a prototype, so things might change, of course. Hopefully, these guys won't change. I really do like them quite a bit. So, I'm showing you Ala, and here's here's Mimik with her giant or his giant ears. Not sure if Mimic is a boy or a girl over here, but these pieces are are really nice and there's no reason to make them like this other than they're fancy and they're fun to play with. They're these nice big chunky wooden things. And the fact that they're handmade is is cool as well. Uh I I like games where you're bidding and you're spending victory points and and potentially like it's telling you something. You know, if a player says, "Oh, I'm going to win zero tricks." And they put a whole bunch of influence on that. That gives you some good information, too. So, there is some communication there and we all enjoyed the game and as I said maybe more than I thought I was going to because the card counting is so different, but I like that. Now, the one thing that I think was well, two things I'm going to say potentially might be a downside. This is a prototype, but you you can see very clearly that these these mats are not flat. The prototype did not keep did not keep these things flat enough. So, the the meeples are really well built and they do stand up. They don't tip over, but on the mat sometimes they would just because of the way that it's made. I'm sure that's going to be worked out before the final game comes.
The other thing that sometimes was a headache for some of the players, and I I feel I'm one of those players, too, is that there were some rounds, multiple times this happened, where there were no missions and only events. So, you've got three special rules and you're not you don't have an opportunity an opportunity to win any extra points that round because if it's not a mission, you're not going to earn the reward. So, we didn't like those rounds as much as when we had something to shoot for, like, I really want to try to win. I'm going to put three as my bid because if I win it, I'm going to get those points plus the the additional points based on what I put on there as my uh influence that I'm committing to that round. But when we didn't have the missions, it it was a bit more confusing. It was a bit harder to keep track of the rules because there were multiple different rules. I think that uh I would house rule it maybe and maybe they'll change the rule book around too because this is only a prototype. But I think I'd house rule it where if you get three events and there's no missions that you would discard those and redraw so that you have at least one um that you can work towards. That might uh eliminate that concern that some of the players including myself had around the table.
But look, this was a fun little trick-taking game. So, uh, it's definitely unique with the deck building element and the table presence is pretty fantastic when you've got these wooden meeples. So, I have to thank Mo for giving me a chance to test this out. Uh, and it is coming to Kickstarter soon. As soon as I have information about it, I will add that to the show notes below the video. If you have any questions or comments, you can, of course, leave them in the comments section below. You can email me at brianbrainsgames.ca. Brainsgames.ca CA is the website. That's where future episodes will go and the previous ones are already up there. Brains on Games is the X handle in the Facebook page and the Instagram feed and the blue sky feed. We're all over the place. And if you enjoyed this video and you want to be notified of future ones, you can head on over to YouTube and click that subscribe button. Thanks for joining me and hopefully I'll see you next time.