Queen of Spies preview play and impressions
Transcript
Hey everybody, this is Mike with the OneStop Co-op Shop. And today I'm doing a preview play with impressions of Queen of Spies, an upcoming solo game. And as always, we take no compensation or payment from publishers. We just want to help you make an informed decision. And if you like the content on the OneStop Co-op shop, consider supporting us through Patreon. You get early access to our videos and exclusive videos every month you can't see anywhere else. You can also listen to our weekly podcast for reviews and design discussions, or join the conversation and say hi on our Discord. So before I get started, disclaimer for this one. Liz Davidson and David Thompson are the designers of this and Liz and David are both friends of mine and Liz especially this is the first game of hers. She's been doing a ton of designing lately uh that I am getting to play. So I'm still going to treat the game fairly, but there's obviously a potential for bias. So I just wanted to get that out there before I start. But the idea of Queen of Spies is it's during World War II. you are in Belgium and you are a group of spy cells trying to undermine Nazi efforts uh accomplish certain missions specifically. There are four missions or stories to play in the game. One is an introductory one and then there's three other stories each of which are three partners. They have three acts and I'm going to show you one of those today.
The prisoner of war scenario where I'm trying to rescue some PS from jail and get them to safety if I can. And there's a few core ideas in the game to be aware of before I start playing. So, first of all, you will have your collection of agents you can send on missions. Alice is the leader of the resistance, so she's awesome at everything. That's what all these skills are. There are three different skills you can have in the game. She's also stealthy, this little icon here. And then you start out with one agent from each of the four cells, this blue, green, orange, and gray color. And they each have their own abilities, but you'll see some of their abilities are grayed out because they can actually level up and it changes their art. The art in this one is awesome uh to be more effective at whatever they're doing in their jobs.
Yeah, I get four random agents to start plus Alice. That's my crew. Although they can get arrested, they can die in numerous ways. You can also recruit new people. So, it's a uh it's a changing roster here. Then you also have the locations in the game. Most of these are used in every scenario. So, they have this little icon here. It shows they're just base ones. So, we've got this country house where we can train our operatives or start building items to help the effort. We've got a safe house and a workshop and a church cell where we can make plans for escaping when the troops catch on to us. A big one for this scenario, we've got the jail, three different ways to interact with it. And the three starting PS. We're going to have three in chapter 1, three in chapter 2, and then we will try to get as many of them to safety in chapter 3. And the core resource in the game is time. Whenever we send our operatives to different locations, or if we just have them stay at home, it's going to spend time to do that. And when time runs out, we will have to advance to the next chapter, whether we want to or not. We can also advance ahead of time if we're kind of feeling the heat and things are getting too nasty. And whenever you go to the next chapter, things kind of reset. All of your people that are in jail get released. This success bag that I'll talk about in a moment gets reset.
But importantly, in this scenario, all the PS you haven't rescued yet die. So, you don't want to end the chapter early if you can help it. But also, when a chapter ends, all the things you've leveled up, all the items you've accumulated, those stick around. So, it is kind of a push and pull with your time of how much you can level up without getting caught. And getting caught and success in all your endeavors comes down to the success bag. It starts out with 10 basic tokens with kind of a lighter wood treatment here, although this is a prototype, so who knows? But as the game progresses, you'll be adding these alert tokens to the bag as well. And if you try to do a task and have too many alerts come up, then you'll add a troop to the bag. And if you ever pull a troop while you're doing a task, then you go to jail and your task falls apart. So they have arrested you. And while you're in jail, you're going to see a lot of this in this scenario.
They're going to be interrogating the prisoners. The prisoners are going to be gaining despair and the PS can die from the despair. And if our people go to jail and get interrogated too much, they'll actually give up somebody else in the organization and we'll lose more people. So yeah, there's lots of terrible stuff happening. And each of the stories has its own way of being scored. In the case of the rescuing the prisoners of war story, it will depend on how many prisoners I rescue. Six would be the most I could possibly rescue because there are only six. If I get three to four, it's at least a victory. If I get zero to two, it's a draw or a loss. We'll see how it goes. The game's pretty tough. I lost my last few plays. Maybe I'll do better now. So, the first step to each round is to assign operatives. And I can place out all my operatives or only a few of them. But anybody I don't place out is going to cost me that much time. So, not using your people is usually not wise. But before I go into actually assigning my people, let's uh talk about a few of the important locations for this one. So, I said you have the country house where you can train up your operatives. And once they're trained, they can also start developing items like the bomb at the tech training or the false papers at the jail key at the manipulation training. Doing that action will get them in the workshop where they can actually be built. And in the case of the bomb, it can free everybody from the jail in one fell swoop. In the case of the jail keys, you have to follow up by doing a breakout action at the jail. But the keys are a safer way to get them out. When you use the bomb, you have a chance of actually killing the people you wanted to save. And also, the bomb
is taken away when it's used, although it comes back at the beginning of the next chapter. So, you get a chance to build a bomb again. So, I definitely want to go for one or the other. But the only people who can build the items are ones who have already been trained. So, Alice starts out trained in everything. But like Quirin here, I don't know if that's how to say her name, she can never build an item cuz she cannot be trained in green or red. Katya, on the other hand, currently is not trained in tech, but if I trained her, she could then start working on the bomb, which actually, you know what, that's the first thing I'm going to do. So, I'm going to assign Katya to the country house for tech training. And whenever you assign somebody, you look at the task down here. It tells how many successes, how much what's called progress you'll need to succeed at the task. In this case, just one. And it tells how much time the action is going to take. And you take that many time tokens from your allotment. In chapter 1, it's just 20. and you put them on the action. So, until those run out, I want to actually resolve the country house training. You'll see how that goes in a second. I also want to train somebody in better insight. Uh that could be Felicia or Quirin. Again, not sure. These are probably Belgian names. Uh but I'm going to pick her because she does have stealth. And as you see, when I get to the uh resolution of the task, having stealth is really nice. So, it's a little bit more dangerous for me to send Felicia for the training there. All right, that's two more time. And I also want to start getting better people. I can go to the pub to recruit. Alice is the only one left who has stealth. So, we're going to send her herself. Boom.
Have fun. Then, [sighs] I guess for the last one, I'm going to send Bernardet and Felicia to the church seller. So, the church seller has a special uh thing where you can make escape plans, which will prevent one people from getting arrested. It takes three time, which sucks. And also, you need to have at least two people assigned here. And the other negative thing is anytime you assign two or more people to the same action, if they aren't from the same cell, so in this case, Felicia's from blue and Bernardet's from green, then you have to add an alert token to the bag because they're not coordinating too well and they don't know who each other are. If Alice was there, she would automatically coordinate between them and you wouldn't have that negative. But here, yeah, it's not working out. So, I get an alert token of the bag, which is not great. Okay, next we get to the remove time step of the turn. And we take away one time from each location that has time remaining on it. And these go out of the supply. So, not back to my 20 I have to actually do the mission.
And additionally, if I had kept any operatives in my hand and had not had them go to a location, I would have lost one time for each of them as well. You can't just leave them sitting around and gain back a lot of time that way. Okay. Now, we resolve assignments for any place that has zero time markers remaining, which currently is none. So, it's going to take another turn before Alice gets to recruit, before Katya gets to train, all that stuff. So, usually we'd be done if nobody was in jail, which for most scenarios, they aren't yet. But with the PS, we're not so lucky. We're going to resolve interrogation. So, how interrogation works is for each person individually, we look at how many interrogation tokens are currently on the jail. Right now, there's one. So, we have to draw one token at a time for each of them. And if it doesn't have a check mark, what gets you progress when you're doing missions, then they suffer one despair. So, they're okay. Hey, you ignore everything else on the token. You'll find out what these alert symbols and things means later. But Vtorin did not crack under pressure. Sephora, oh did so, she gets one to spare out of three. And Theodilus uh is okay. That is a progress even though it was a time. Again, I'll explain what those mean when they come up. And then the interrogation gets more intense. You add another one if anybody's still in the jail, which means next time they'll have to draw two tokens each. And once they get to three, if they were a player operative, that's when they would give up the other members of the team. But for these people, if they get to three, they have succumbed under the pressure of the interrogation and they pass away before you can rescue them. All right. And with that, we go back around to assign operatives, but they're all still assigned. We remove time, so stuff's going to actually happen. Now, everyone's ready to go now, except for
the ones forming the escape plan, including her training at the house. But now I get to decide what order to resolve the locations in, which can be important because if one place goes badly, it might catch the attention of troops and then that same troop might be drawn in another person's case. Uh, so with that in mind, let's go and resolve Alice's first. So, we're trying to recruit somebody new in the pub, which takes a single manipulation progress, and Alice has two levels in manipulation. She is trained. When you have only one level, you draw two tokens from the bag, and that's it. When you have two levels, when you're trained, you can draw 0, one, two, or three tokens from the bag at your choice. Uh, the zero might not make sense yet, but when you have multiple people on the same action, and like the first one already succeeds, it's great to have the zero option cuz then you don't have to draw those tokens and potentially get bad stuff. Now, at the start, the bag has seven progress markers in the bag and three failures. We've added one alert. Right now, it's a seven out of 11 chance. So, I'll have her draw two and hopefully nothing terrible will happen.
Okay, so this actually worked out great. Let's show you what we got. So, if we had multiple characters, we would draw for all of them and kind of add up the progress. But here, the check mark means Alice has gotten one green manipulation progress here. The X does absolutely nothing. It just means it's a failed token. So, we have successfully recruited at the pub. We're going to choose one operative from the supply and take them into your hand. But then, we have to add another alert token to the bag. Actually, I forgot about that. Maybe I shouldn't have done Alice first. So now I can pick anybody I want. And let's see. Currently my blue and my green person don't have stealth. But my stealthy person getting trained already has blue has investigation and insight. So I think I'm going to get Shantel who unlike Bernardet can't do tech as well as manipulation but she has the stealth icon which I think is very helpful. So she'll go into my hand. She's an operative I can assign from now on. And if I needed to, I could send her and Bernardet together without adding that alert token because they're from the same cell. All right. After you resolve the action, you then check if you were stealthy enough. So you compare the number of alert tokens drawn, in this case one, to the number of stealth icons on operatives attempting the mission.
And if the alerts exceed the number of stealth, then that's when you add a troop to the bag who could arrest somebody in the future. But in this case, we're fine. One alert does not exceed one stealth. So these go back in the bag. Alice comes back to my hand and the progress is gone. We've already completed the action. All right, next we'll try to resolve Katya's training. She needs to draw two tokens because she's only level one and she needs one success and we're good. She got two successes, more than she needs. And she did have stealth, so we're safe there. So when you train her the first time, she just comes back to your hand, but now she's her more assured self. Look at her. She's lockpicking with the best of them. But if she went back here or if I send somebody like Alice who's already trained since they can't flip again, instead what they do is they get the item into the workshop ready to be built, which is probably what I'll do next. All right. And last action. We'll see if she can get trained as well.
Uh-oh. Okay. Well, this this worked out interestingly. So, she didn't add a troop cuz she did get the alert token, but only one, which doesn't exceed her stealth. But she also failed to actually train uh cuz she didn't get at least one progress. So, she goes back sadness. Now, in locations where they need multiple successes, like uh for example, if I was trying to build the bomb once I put it in the workshop, and I would need three progress, they do build up unless the specific action says they don't. So, like if she had gotten one and she needed two, that would sit there until the next time somebody went and added more, but in this case, it's one or nothing. So, she does not get trained. Sad. And Felicia and Bernardet are still one round away from getting the escape plan finalized. So, they are not done, but we do have to do our PS again. All right, Victorin is drawing two. Oh, two checks. He's fine. Sephora, uh, let's see how she does. A check and a not check. So, she is one despair away. And Theodilus, uh, two checks. Okay, but now we go to three interrogation. That is the max. You cannot go above that. But it does mean that any of them could pass away at any time. And by the way, if there is a troop token in the bag and you draw it for one of their interrogation checks, they immediately die. But uh when that happens, all the troop tokens are removed from the bag.
Same thing if one of your people gets arrested. They think that they've uh caught the people involved for now, I guess. Small consolation for losing somebody you're trying to save, but uh at least it can help you out. All right, so now we're going back into it. Uh we've got Katya and Alice trained up to maybe get that bomb, which is what I'm thinking I want to do. But I don't need both of them because right now I'm just still doing the one progress. Uh the three progress is when you're actually building the bomb at the workshop. That's a bit more challenging. So, I'll send Katya by herself to uh figure out the idea for the bomb. And then I could also do this smuggling action. Only takes one time. Only needs one success. But for each progress you get for the insights check, you remove one to spare from somebody. So, I could uh make Sephora have more time to be uh helped.
Although, it would automatically add alert tokens of a success bag cuz I guess delivering nice things or smuggling nice things in to the PS raises suspicion. So yeah, let's let's try to keep her alive. So I'll go smuggle some stuff in with her. And that again is a one-timer. And then I'm gonna have Alice go to the safe house. So the safe house is an interesting location. You can send as many people as you want there. And the time on the action is equal to the number of operatives sent. So if I had sent both of them, it would have been two time. But then when it resolves, there's no check. Instead, you just freely remove one alert token from the success bag for each operative. So you get a bigger result by taking more time. But here I want to do it before I do their checks just so there's fewer alerts in there. So I'll send Alice there and then for Shantel. Now let's get our train to the other country house. We could potentially get the jail keys instead of the bomb or some false papers to help us avoid troops. Right.
So that's two time there, one time for Alice. I've only got seven time left. Oh crap. I forgot it's going to take two time for Katchcha to build the bomb. Can I finish the bomb in time? It's only a single time to build it. So yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure. All right, so we will resolve Alice first and get rid of one of the what? Two alert tokens in the bag, I think, just to make everybody else a little bit safer. Oh, and sorry, I need to remove the time from everybody. Felicia and Bernardet finish the escape plan and items you finish, go to the safe house generally. And it says, "When used, if you draw a troop token, you use the escape plan to avoid going to jail. Uh, place the pulled troop token in the supply and pull a token to replace it. Then place this card in the church seller." So, it just uh saves you once and then you got to build it again, but still pretty nice thing to have. And then it's just her uh trying to save Sephora. And okay, this is a terrible result.
Well, so I didn't talk about this. The clock ones don't get you alert, but it means that the task took more time than you thought. So I lose two time for my supply immediately for those two tokens. Now, she does get to remove one from each of them uh for each success, but then we add an alert to the bag automatically. But none of that might matter because I have too many people to like even have time. Maybe I just like have everybody. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. If I send like a lot of people to the same location, it uses less time and it's going to get a lot of alert tokens. Uh, okay. What might be a moot point if they crack under pressure? So, let's see. Victorin check mark. Not check mark. Check mark. Just one to spare. Sephora. Oh, looks like she's really happy with the gift we sent. Or you could also see it as Mike didn't need to do anything there because she would have been fine.
And finally, oh, it's an X and a check mark and a check mark. So, they all have one despair. But again, I'm more worried about my time. I only have three time left and they all die immediately if I don't get to them before that runs out. And yeah, how can I even do that? Cuz remember, I can't leave them behind or they'll pull all the time anyway. Here. Okay, I think this is the best I could do. If I send Alice and Felicia and Bernardet to uh talk to the guard at the jail, which takes away interrogation tokens, that technically only takes one time. And since Alice was with them, we don't have to add any alert. But I still need to send her somewhere or just keep her at home. I guess I'll send her to the safe house to remove another alert from the bag. And I mean, still isn't going to work out. Is it even worth it to Is it even worth it to send them to the jail? Is there anywhere else I can go with them? I mean, I at least want them to finish what they're doing. So, instead, let's send them all to the No, I use up too much time. Never mind.
Yeah, we'll do what I did. We'll do what I did. Um, so I'll have her go first and remove the one token from the bag. Then I'll have Katya go so we can at least be closer to having the bomb. Should have just rushed things and had Alice start making the bomb from the beginning cuz she didn't need to be trained. Now, I do get to decide how many to pull for Katcha. I'm actually going to pull only one cuz I really don't want to get the time. And okay, cool. So, she has successfully moved the bomb to the workshop. We need to send some people there and get at least three successes to build it in the future. Okay. And finally, let's see if Shantel uh trains. And she does train. And she doesn't get discovered. All right, that was cool. Oh, whoops. I guess that means that we are going to talk to the guard. We have to resolve all these people. We can do whatever order we want. We can have Alice go last and do zero pulls. Uh, okay. See what happens to Bernardet.
That's a lot of alert. I mean, it will be okay, though. The bag's about to reset anyway. All right. Now, we'll do Felicia. We should keep it on them. Uh, that is one time. And we did have one time left, so we're not done yet. Okay, then Alice. Yeah, clearly we're not going to pull anything. And oh, they don't have stealth. So, that would add a soldier to the bag cuz look, we have two alerts versus only one stealth. But again, it's about to come out anyway at the end of the chapter. And what would this have done? we would have removed one interrogation marker for each progress. So, does that even go down to zero? Not that it's going to matter because uh with time out, that's the end of the chapter. Which means after uh standing up to a lot of terrible stuff, all three of these people sadly are gone. And I've now locked myself out to what's my best possible result. If I rescue all three of the other ones, that could be good. And I have set myself up for some success in chapter 2. I've got a bomb built. I've got uh how many people trained? I've got one new person in the group and I've got three trained operatives, all with stealth. So, it's not all terrible. Oh, and I forgot I also had the escape plan. So, cool. All right, so we go into chapter two. We take out everything extra in the bag.
But at the start of chapter 2, you add a troop automatically. At the start of chapter 3, you add two troops. Although, I haven't shown you the train station yet. We might be able to deal with that. And this time, we get 25 time tokens, five more than chapter 1, so we can try to accomplish more. And yeah, let's uh let's get into it. So, we get our last three PS cuz chapter 3 is about trying to rescue them. So, if I don't get any of these people, I've already lost. No point even playing chapter 3. Uh, and we start out with one interrogation again. All right. So, the train station, one of the only places I haven't gone to yet. If I succeed at a two check for insight for blue, then I can remove a troop token from the bag and place it in the supply. But I also have to place one alert token in the success bag. Although, it only takes a single time, so it's pretty quick. And let's send I want stealthy people because there's not much point in getting rid of a troop if you immediately add one again. So what if I send Alice and Quirine together? Uh Quirine can pull first if we don't already get the two successes. Alice can pull whatever seems appropriate. And that'll give us two alerts to tank if needed. Then I want to get the bomb going pretty quickly. So I'm going to send Bernardet and Katya both there.
That immediately adds an alert to the bag because they're from different cells. That also only takes one time. And then to deal with that alert, let's send Shantel over here to the the hideout, the safe house to get rid of one alert. And then finally, what the hey, we'll have Felicia try to get trained again. So that used up four, five time. So we still got 20 left. Let's see how things go. I'm going to have Shantel resolve her uh safe house first to get rid of the alert token. Then I'm going to have Alice and Quarine try to get rid of the troop. Now, there is a chance that they will draw the troop token. One of them will get arrested. That would be bad. All right, we'll have Queen go first. She has to draw two. That's good. Oh, that's very good. So, we can have Alice, who is trained, draw none. We've already gotten the two we need. And one alert is not more than two stealth. Oh, sorry. I didn't actually remove the time for this. Long story short, that was fabulous. So, we get to remove the troop token, which also takes away the chance of sudden deaths for the PS, but we do have to add one alert to the bag. All right. Now with the troop gone, let's have them try to build the bomb. So Bernardet, who does not have stealth, is going to go first cuz she has to draw two. And then we can see how much Katya needs to do. We need three successes.
That's a bad start. That's a little better. So that's one time gone. Now, don't forget progress will stick around. So I don't need to go crazy with Katya. We can only deal with one alert at this point. So I'm just going to have Katya draw two and not the max three she can do as a trained tech person. Okay, this worked out way too good. We get one uh alert, which we can deal with, and we immediately finish the bomb. So, it goes on the safe house, and I think you just use it whenever you want. That was one thing I was not 100% clear on. So, I think I can get the three PS out immediately. And then the rest of the time I can just spend like building stuff and recruiting people and trying to lay low as needed. All right, but Felicia, let's see if you can get trained this time. You can, but you also with your zero stealth self. Your zero stealth self. That's what I was trying to say. Brought down the law. So, there's a troop coming for us. But now she is trained in insight. Cool. Oh, wait. What am I doing? None of that happened yet because her time hasn't run out. I I shouldn't even be resolving that. All right. Now, we got to draw for interrogation of our friends. We're about to bomb them out. I just hope they don't die. Okay, so that would have killed Ward, by the way, if we were using the bomb right now, but he just takes a despair. And Ursula also, I'm not liking these X's. That's what kills them when the bomb is done. And then Yan is okay. Okay, not despairing. They're about to get more interrogation. Let's blow it up. Yes. So, again, I'm not sure when I use it, but I think it's now. So, I get two alert tokens automatically.
Yikes. And then I can either move six time tokens from the discard to the supply, so I could get some time back. Or I can get everyone out of the jail, but I have to draw a single token for each of them, and for each if they get an X, they die. And I'm assuming this is like the interrogation where you draw at a time and then put the tokens back uh and not that the X's stay out to make other people safer. And then this gets discarded. Again, I could build in a later chapter, but I don't think there's going to be much use or need. All right, here we go. Ward alive. Yay. So, they go to the safe house. We can't actually rescue them until chapter three. All right, Ursula, how about you? Yes. All right, come on now. Flawless prison break. You were the only one who didn't get an X last. Gosh. Okay, so she's dead. So now the best I can do is rescuing two. I'm sorry. I did set the explosive better, but the interrogation is gone cuz they don't have anybody in custody anymore. All right, so with that, let's decide where to put our people. We have a ton of alert tokens in the bag, but still no soldiers yet.
Although that could change very quickly with Felicia now that there's all those alert tokens. Speaking of all those alert tokens, let's send Shantel and Bernardet together. That's for two time to get rid of two alert tokens. And don't forget, we can end the chapter on any turn we want. Although like not when we're assigning people and resolving them. But I think I can chance a bit more danger. I feel like there might be a troop token after Felicia goes. Maybe I want to like preemptively get rid of it. Nah, that seems a little silly, especially with me having the escape plan. And they're already all trained. Maybe Alice can get us a new friend at the pub. Then Quirine can like start building up train stations. I mean, why not? We'll see what happens. It doesn't take too much time. What's Katchcha going to do? She's already trained. There's nothing to build at the tech house. I guess I'll just keep her behind and we'll lose one time. All right, so the two getting resolved this time are the train station and the country house training. Let's do the training first because it might add the troop that we would then be getting rid of at the train station.
And yes, indeed, she doesn't have any stealth, so she is now trained. But there's also a troop in the bag now, which could spell trouble over here. She's not trained yet. Oh no. Okay, so it doesn't matter what the other result. Actually, wait, do I I think I technically draw one at a time. Let me check the rules on that. I'm just not sure if I lose the time before she gets arrested. I'll go and assume that it's the worst interpretation. So, I'll lose the time and send her to jail. That's not great. But again, all the troop tokens come out of the bag. Now, technically, I think it means we also didn't succeed at the task. We don't have to resolve the one uh alert being added to the bag. Small favor there. Now, we can end the chapter early and then she's automatically rescued. But, I think I at least want to finish recruiting again at the pub before I do that. So, I guess I'm going to let her get interrogated this time. Sorry. Oh, she did get one to spare. Not great.
Well, here then I'll send Felicia to make her feel better and smuggle some stuff in. And Katy, I'll just keep it behind and lose the time cuz again, I'm going to end the uh the day early or the chapter early to not have her stay in jail. All right, then all three of these come off. So, these two get to remove two alerts. Do we have that many? Oh, we do indeed. We have more than two. All right, so they did their job. Oh, I forgot. Um, you know what? I'm not going to use the escape plan yet cuz I want to save that for when we actually rescue the PS. All right. Now, um, Felicia doesn't have any stealth. So, let's have her go next. And I'm just going to have her do a single pull cuz she's uh, good at manipulation. Gosh darn it. So, that's a troop added to the bag. Great. And she also didn't make uh, her feel any better. Okay. And then Alice is going to try to recruit someone. I'll pull two. All right. There we go. That's what we needed. Let's I want somebody else who's stealthy. And what do I have less of? I think maybe I'll get this guy for more manipulation. And I think I have to draw for her interrogation one more time before I can call it a day.
Okay. And she only took one to spare. So I think if I stop there and just give up the rest of my time. Yeah. Since I can only do it at the end of a round after interrogation and all lingering assignments would just automatically be failed and you remove the people. All the nastiness is taken out of the bag. But then two troop tokens are added in and I get all the time in the world. But we're not done. We get three new locations. These are ways to escape with the PS. So, let's look at our options as we figure out which one we want to do. So, the border checkpoint doesn't require any special items. We need a single blue, but then two greens per pow rescue. We've got two PS, so that would be four green progress. We get two alert tokens no matter what. But if we fail to get at least two manipulation and one insight, then everyone who that we sent here is killed. You don't have to bring everybody. The boat is a little bit easier. You rescue a P for each tech progress, but we need the disguise to be built already. That's when we build at the insight location. Then the train is also one per, but we need a disguise and false papers. Yuck. Oh, and the border checkpoint is also the longest time. But I think I think we could do the border checkpoint. Uh, except there's all those soldiers. But the escape plan Yeah, the escape plan literally gets rid of a troop token if I understand it correctly. And I keep on pulling. So it doesn't even like cancel the test. So maybe if I can send some people to the train station and then do like a big border checkpoint, I can at least rescue the the couple of people that I managed to keep around. We'll try it out. All right, so we can start the border checkpoint going now cuz this is going to take forever to actually complete. So let's send Alice there so that uh
they're going to be able to like combine forces well. And then I got to decide what she's doing. I mean green is the most important one. We only need a single blue. So, I can send someone like Quirin fresh out of jail to do the blue test. And then Shantel and Pepin. That would let me draw two at a minimum. I need four to rescue everybody. Uh, but both Alice and Shantel could draw up to three more. Seems like an good enough posi to take care of things. And again, I get no automatic alerts cuz Alice is there to coordinate. Oh, but wait a second. I'm just realizing that Quirina has stealth and Felicia doesn't. And I don't really care about stealth on this one cuz it'll be too late if new soldiers get added. So, let's send Felicia to do this. And Quirine can go to the train station to uh try to get rid of some of those troops. I'm going to do that a few times, I think. Oh, and I got to say both PS are going. And then I guess I'll send both of them to the safe house. And that does add an alert immediately because there's two of them. But that can clear out a lot of uh badness before the the border crossing comes through.
All right. All right. So, the only test actually being uh figured out right now is Quirines. And she has to draw two. Oh, that's great. Oh, wait. It's not great. Oh, no. It is great. She has one stealth. Yay. I'm glad I sent her instead of Felicia. So, we did actually get rid of one troop. And the great part about that is we only have one troop in the bag right now. And the escape plan can ignore them and draw a replacement person. So, that's fantastic. And nobody's getting interrogated. So, yeah. You know what? I'm just going to play it slow and steady. Uh lose the time for Quirine being around as we go through these people. And then Bernardet and Katchcha finish laying low. I think we only have one alert to get rid of. Yes, that's right. The one we added for the train station action. So that's three people doing nothing, but I'm okay with that. I'm just going to lose three time for that one and three more time for this one. Not assigning them cuz really with only two PS left is an all or nothing thing. If I had more PS, I would have like you can only use each of these once. So I would have had to build the other items and try the other things.
I've sort of made this final chapter boring because I was bad. All right, so here we go. Let's uh let's do green first. All right, so Pepen has to draw two. All right, two successes already. So that's half what we need. Let's have Shantel draw. Well, there's only certain number of successes in here. Let's have Shantel draw two, I think. Okay, that's a lot of nothing. Oh, wait. And I definitely pulled the wrong thing out. That's supposed to be a soldier cuz I was like, "Wait, there shouldn't be any alerts in there." So, I'll use the escape plan. Uh, he goes back to the supply and I draw a replacement token, which is a check. All right. So, before I have Alice go, I do need to get at least one blue. So, let's have Felicia draw three, I guess. And Okay, that was closer than I would have liked. So, let's have Alice draw three, as well. I think that's the entire bag. Yes. Okay, so we've gotten six successes, which is two more than we need. So both Ward and Ursula do escape and then clearly what do we have? One, two, three alerts and oh actually three stealth. So we literally don't attract the soldiers attention cuz we're just that good.
Although it's only because of the escape plan that we succeeded if I use that correctly. And we have the excellent result of a draw. You mourn the loss of the majority of the PS. I'm so sorry you attempted to help. But you take comfort in the fact that every life saved is precious. Well, at least I didn't actually fail like my last two games. So, that's a little taste of this pre-production version of Queen of Spies. I'm sure they're still messing around with things, but mostly you can see like the graphic design and stuff are done. And what do I think of this one? First of all, I love the art style. I love the littleh touch of the characters like changing their art as they level up. I just think that's super cool. I also think the decisions are pretty tense and interesting, especially in the kind of chaining of actions together, like trying to get, you know, your safe house team to finish up right before you do like a really important test because that way you can take the alert tokens out to make those tests more successful. And then you saw that like if you send a bunch of people to do a job, especially if they have stealth, it can really mitigate the badness, especially when they're trained and you have a lot of options for how you draw from the bag. You can also mitigate with items being built. So, I think there's a lot of fun strategic options here with how you tackle tasks and things, especially as your team gets bigger and building up your team across the three chapters, leveling them up, you know, taking the time and making the risk to do that. Uh, that's another one of the interesting choices in the game. But, I do think the bag is going to be a part that not everyone loves. Like I said, there's a lot of mitigation, but sometimes you are just drawing from the bag and you run out of time and you can't complete something or you happen to get the one troop that's in there and your person gets arrested. There is some
kindness in all the troops getting removed after one gets pulled. So even if you build up a ton, it's not going to like arrest your entire team. But yeah, if you don't like randomness, I think this one might still annoy people. Yes, there's mitigation, but in the end, it is kind of that tense gut check of making the pool from the bag. That's a lot of the excitement from the game. So if it doesn't seem exciting to you, but seems like it might be frustrating, I think this might be one to avoid. Another thing I like are the unique stories. They have their own locations, a whole bunch of them for each story. They have new items you can build, like you're trying to train pigeons in one, for example. And they change up the strategies you go for. They change up what you're trying to accomplish. So, I like all of that, especially for a small game like this. Now, the one potential negative is I do think you might follow somewhat similar strategies on a given playthrough. Like, uh, for this one, you need to get the jail key or the dynamite. That's literally the only way to get the PS out. So, clearly, you're going to do stuff that will enable that to happen. And then you always have the same test for trying to um help the PS escape. Although I do think your success is going to change things. Like you saw here, I only had two PS so I could kind of uh mono focus on one escape method with more. I would have had to be much more thoughtful of how I did stuff. I probably would have wanted to be building the disguise ahead of time so I'd be ready for that task when it came up. So things like the luck, the randomized starting team of operatives, that's going to change how you approach each mission. But I do think there is some syiness within plays of the same mission. When you play the pigeon one, you're going to have the same locations and the same goals. You might level up in similar ways. So, while the game has four completely unique plays, I do think
future plays are going to really depend on how much you're into the system and the success bag and trying to get a higher score and perform better than last time. The longevity of the game in general will depend on what kind of gamer you are. The game should be up on crowdfunding soon or today. I'm not sure when I'm going to publish the video in relation to the campaign, but it's a fun one with great art. So, check it out if you're interested. Thanks for watching everybody, and a special thank you to our biggest Patreon supporters, Jay, William F, Steve Ren, Pedro Lucas, Miles, Casey W, Andrew R, and Chris C. We'll see you at the next