Queen of Spies | A Solo Game with Tense and Thematic Decisions | Board Game Preview

0:00 Hello everybody. My name is Ilia and without me is Tyler. Because this is my second solo video. And why is this a solo video? Well, because I'm covering a solo game, The Queen of Spies. Now, Queen of Spies is designed by Liz Davidson and David Thompson and is published by Salt and Pepper Games. Let's give you an overview of the game before I dive into my thoughts. In Queen of Spies, you'll take the role of Alice, a journalist turned resistance leader who now runs a covert network of spies in the small town of St. Francois to sales in the midst of World War I. You'll recruit and train spies, sending them on missions to decipher secret messages, thwart hidden plans, and carry out risky assignments that could decide the course of the war. Each game consists of an independent story structured in three chapters. You'll win if you complete the mission objective laid out in the story. Or lose if Alice is led to despair or death while in jail, if you run out of despair markers due to excessive interrogations, or if you need to add an alert or troop token to the success bag and none are available. Now, Queen of Spies is played over three chapters. Each chapter will be a series of rounds that continues until the chapter ends, typically because you run out of time. Each round has four phases. Let's run through them while using the first story. News on the wing. Here, your goal is to obtain pigeons, train them to return to your safe house, and deliver them to various locations so they can return to you with fresh intelligence. You'll score at the end of the round based on the number of trained pigeons sent to gather intelligence. Now, you'll start the

1:30 story with 20 time markers in the first chapter. Now, the phases. Phase one, assign operatives. Here you'll assign opters from your hand to locations around town to train, gather items, complete missions, and pursue objectives. Each assignment is made up of one or more tasks, each showing a required skill, its color, and the amount of progress needed. Operatives can only be assigned to tasks matching their skills. Now, you can send multiple operatives to the same task, but if operatives from different cells meet at a location, you must add an alert token to the success bag, unless Alice is there coordinating, which prevents the penalty. Once operatives are assigned, place time markers on each location where a new assignment began. Any unused operatives will cost you one time marker from your pool. Phase two, remove time.

2:20 Here, you'll remove one time marker from every location with assigned operatives. When a last time marker is removed from the location, that assignment is ready to resolve. Phase three, resolve assignments. Here, you'll perform success checks for each operatives by drawing tokens from the success bag. You'll draw two for untrained operatives or choose 0 to three for trained operatives. Progress helps you complete tasks, while alert and time losses make the situation tenser. If you complete the task, you'll gain the reward of the location. If not, the progress usually stays for the future rounds. After resolving the checks, compare all alerts drawn at the location to the total stealth icons on the operative's present. If alerts are higher, you'll add a troop token to the bag. Now, if any operative draws a troop token during their check, they're immediately arrested and proceed to jail. The assignment fails and all progress there is lost. On a plus side, all troop tokens are removed from the bag at this point. Phase four, resolve interrogation. If anyone's in jail, you'll perform an interrogation for each imprisoned operative. Some may resist, others may gain despair, and if they gain too much, they may break, leading to harsh consequences for the network, a betrayal of another operative.

3:39 Additionally, if a troop token appears during interrogation, that operative is killed and removed from the game. After you've completed all interrogations, you'll add an interrogation marker if operatives remain in jail. The jail can at most have three interrogation markers. You won't add any more after this, and these signify how many tokens you need to draw from the success bag for each interrogation. At this point, the round ends, and you begin another. Now, let's talk about ending the chapter. A chapter ends when you run out of time markers, or you may choose to end it at a close of a round. Unfinished assignments are abandoned. Between chapters, you'll reset the success peg, clear all progress, build a pool of time markers for the next chapter. Additionally, you'll keep all the items you've built, and retain all the training. Your operatives will return to your hand, unless Alice is in jail, in which case you lose immediately. New story locations are added as the narrative escalates, and later chapters will start with troops in the bag, increasing the danger. Now, back to our story, News on the Wing. This story has you building a messenger network of pigeons under enemy occupation. You'll acquire pigeons, train them to return home, and send them across the region to gather intelligence. As chapters advance, the town expands and the pressure rises. You'll need to manage training, risk, and timing carefully to earn the best final score. You'll score in this chapter based on the pigeons you sent to specific locations and success tokens you draw for that location at the end of the game. Now, with that out of

5:10 the way, let's talk about the Queen of Spies. Now, this is a solo game and it definitely feels like a solo game. Even Tyler and I tried to play it together, and it really feels like decisions are meant for one person. But what's really neat about it is at the beginning of the game, you're setting everything up. And at first, I was a little shocked at how much of a table presence this game is. This is not a small table game. There's a lot of locations being laid out. There's space needed for the various operatives need to go in various locations. But what's really neat about that is how thematic it feels because you do feel like you're at this table and looking over the city deciding where your operatives need to go and what you need to do to make the best of it. And I think that's kind of the first key feature of this game is how thematic it truly feels. You do get attached to these operatives as you begin to train them, as you begin to send them at various locations and you are really hoping for their success. If someone does go to jail, do you care about them and do you actually want to release them from jail to help your mission or is that inefficient which sometimes it is.

6:15 So weighing that decision-m between the different locations and deciding what to do. Do you get rid of that troop token because it can come up but at the detriment of time that you may not have. It's a really tricky situation and I remember the first time I played this game I lost miserably. But it's part of that trial and error process because the more that you played this game, you do genuinely feel like you are getting better at it and you are getting better at making the decisions, deciding when to do various things. Now, besides the theme, I think the presentation of this game is just spectacular. the art. Meibo Foundry just does a really good job at producing how the games look and the flow of the game and understanding user experience within the cards. Even having the edges of the operatives of where they need to go, if they're accessible for that aspect, the way that the iconography really flows, it's super smooth. As you can expect from Salt and Pepper games. Now, we've been really big fans of Salt and Pepper recently.

7:12 They've released some extremely good two-player games. Operation Barlay, Battle for Versailles, Battle of the Divas, and now some bigger games as well, like The Voinish Puzzle. So, this is a publisher I always look for, and I'm always excited to see what they have next on the horizon. Let's also talk about bag building. Now, this is a really unique bag building type of game because the success bag is essentially used to see how well you do in missions. And the main way to really modify it is to throw more alert tokens in there and throw troops in there, which are both inherently bad and you want to avoid them at all costs. But managing of when you want to send more operatives, for example, and add that alert token because the cost of adding alert token is actually worth it uh is really interesting. And a lot of mission outcomes will also add alerts to your bag. Some mission outcomes will add troops. As chapters progress, troops get added. So managing that is a really really core and interesting aspect of this game because I found myself thinking do I go and remove that one troop token because Alice is my only operative that still needs to be resolved and if she draws a troop token is in jail it's near the end of the round I will lose this game. So deciding how to even order and activate all the activations of all the assignments is just really interesting and it left me coming back to this game again and thinking through it and really trying to find those optimal pathways which are not super apparent and they're always different based on the conditions that

8:42 are presented in the game. The last thing I'll talk about is the amount of content in this game. Now there is an introductory mission which I decided to show you the pigeon mission cuz it's a little bit more fun. But the introductory mission essentially has a really straightforward mission that helps you learn the mechanics of the game and how to flow through the game before you're thrown into the stories. Now, besides a pigeon story, there are two additional stories and missions. One centering around rescuing prisoners of war and the other around an office infiltration, which is really neat because you start completely from scratch. You only have Alice, and your goal is to recruit spies and build your network up, where in the other two missions, you immediately get a hand of operatives. Now, what's neat is there's a ton of opportunity for expansions and growth in this game. There could be chapter packs that come out, which I don't know if this will happen, but I assume if the game is successful, you can see more of the game and you can really enjoy it. But for what's already in the box, I do think there's enough value and enough for replayability because you can continue to beat your score within variety of these missions.

9:43 And they are pretty tricky missions. It's not an easy game. At least I didn't find it easy. I you're gonna go in the comments and be like, "Oh, this was the easiest game." And I'm gonna be like, "Uh, this has happened a few times and I think it's just really funny." But maybe I'm just not great at solo games. But with that said, who is this game for? If you enjoy a little bit of a darker theme, because you are going to jail in this game, you are being killed in this game, there's a lot of danger in this game, and it is centered in World War I, uh, this game may be for you. If you enjoy, if you've played Dispatch, the video game, this does feel a little bit like the Dispatch main puzzle of like sending out operatives to various locations to do various things. Uh, so if you're looking for something like that, trying to balance risk, time management, and all of it all, I think Spies would be a game for you. Now, if you are interested in learning more about this game, you can check out the link down below for the crowdfunding page that has much, much more information and thoughts from other people as well. But before that, if you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit that thumbs up. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and the little bell so you know when our next videos come out and we can all partake in the joy of board gaming. Now, for my question of the day today, what is a spy game that you love to see? Now, this one's obviously centered in a historical aspect of World War I. What kind of spy game would you want to play? Uh especially if you use mechanics of this game as well. Let me know in the comments down below. And Tyler and I will catch you later.