Queen of Spies Prototype + Setup
Transcript
Hey gamers, this is Liz Davidson from Beyond Solitire, and I am so excited to be showing you this video because after years and years and years of covering other people's beautiful games, uh I now have an advanced prototype of my own to show you. Uh so this is Queen of Spies. This is designed by me and by David Thompson. Um, so we have a design partnership and lots of plans, but this is our first game that's gonna actually come to print and uh it is coming out from Salt and Pepper and the art and graphics are by Mele Foundry. And as you can see, they've done a really, really good job. So, Queen of Spies is a game about managing a spy network in like a fictional town in World War I, Belgium. And uh actually the title of the game is inspired by the title of a book about Alice Dubois, which is the name that one such spy was working under. So there's a book about her that's way way out of print. You can find it on like the internet archive called Queen of Spies.
So as you can see, we have this gorgeous cover, but what I was thinking for this video I'd do is open it up, have a look at the components, just enjoy that with y'all, and then set it up. And then I'll do another video where I'm actually playing. So, here is my beautiful Queen of Spies. As you can see, they they spared no expense in terms of like giving me a nicely printed draw bag. It's so nice. Uh it's got all the starting tokens in it, which I'll show you in a moment. Uh we have our cards that have agents on them. Sophie's actually from the mini expansion. Uh but we can go through those in a moment. We have a bunch of locations. So, we're going to talk about how to set up all the locations. Uh, and then we have a bunch of tokens. And um, I'm going to just do a little setup right now. All right. So, I think the first thing I want to do is look at our beautiful agent. So, this is Sophie.
She's part of the mini expansion. So, I'm going to set her aside for now. Uh, but here we have Alice, and she is uh, our main gal. She's the one who coordinates everybody else. Uh, she is trained in all three of the different skill areas. So, every agent in this game uh has three skills that they could have or become trained in. So, Alice is very good at manipulation. She's got the gift of gab. She's got full insight, so she's very good at reading a situation. And she's also tech trained, which means that she's very handy um when we need to build items and set off bombs and all those other things that, you know, spies might do. She's also got stealth, which is the little hat up in the corner. So, she's basically fully specked out and awesome. So, we'll always have her. And then we have these different cells. So, they're just done by color. They used to be cell A, B, C, and D, but that's no longer the case. So, I have to get over that in my own my own life. Um, but basically, we have four different colors of spy cell.
And you might notice they're keyed to the skills that you can have uh in the game. So, everybody who is part of this blue cell is going to have some sort of ability in insight. We'll flip them all to their untrained sides for now. Everybody who's in green is going to have some manipulation skill. Everybody who is red, oh, and these are on their train sides, um, is going to have some tech skill. And then everybody who is kind of grayed out, they will only have one of the game's three skills for passing skill checks, but they also always have stealth. So, you know, they're very handy to have on your mission because even though they only do one thing, they do it very well and they're sneaky about it. So, the way you set up your starting hand is you always get to have Alice and then you pick somebody random from each of the others. So, we're gonna grab Heidi.
And these will get set aside. We could recruit them later. We're going to get Margaret. We are going to get Got my eyes closed here. Bernardet. and we are going to get Kurine. So, this is our starting lineup of operatives. And as you can see, they're all super cool because Carlos Ortiza did an amazing job of illustrating them. I think they look beautiful and they've each got a different little set of skills or options for skills. So, we've got a couple of stealthy people who are also in this blue skill line. Uh, so that's very interesting. We have some sneaky, insightful people in this crew.
Uh, we've got Margaret who can do insight, but she's really built for tech. She's on her untrained side right now, as are they all, and we'll talk about that in a moment. And then you've got Bernardet, who is our chatter box with a little bit of tech ability. Other than Alice, who always starts off trained, everybody here is untrained. So, what that means is right now they've only got a level one in their skill that they're dominant in. Um, but when you train them, they'll flip over to the level two and they will be both cooler looking. Heck yeah. And um, they're going to have more options when it comes to bag pull. So, this is going to become very important when we start playing because the number of tokens that you can choose to draw is different depending on whether or not your operatives are trained.
But for now, here's our starting hand. Got to make sure they all stay on the correct sides. And we'll be deploying these fine people out into the town. So, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to set up the town. And the town consists of a number of different buildings. Some of them are going to appear in every single story line. And then some of them will be specific to different scenarios that you are playing. So, the way this game works is it's split into an interest scenario and then three different stories. Each story contains three chapters. Each chapter takes roughly 20 minutes. So, you can play a full session of a game in an hour, but depending on how things go, you can meet with disaster. And there's also choices about how you want to resolve your situations. So, you may want to replay things a few times and see how well you can figure out how to do and then see how well you can ultimately do. So, we're going to set up just the main part of the town.
Uh, and then I think for the next video, I'll set up the intro scenario. So, we're going to have the country house over here for tech training. Uh, here we have the train station and the pub. I'll explain what all these are in a moment. The safe house and the workshop. It's very fun to see all these things with real art because that is not what we had before. Um, we'll put another country house. Ah, here we have the jail. Actually, we'll spread this out to make room for this jail. The jail is not fun, as we will soon discover. We've got the church cellar, and we have our third country house location. All these other locations are going to make their way into the game later. But basically, each of these is tied to one of the games stories, and so you will see them naturally as you play the game.
The ones we're going to need for the intro scenario are the cafe and the local roads, and you're going to see how those work very shortly. All right, so let's take a quick tour of the town. Uh over here on the left, you have the three country house locations. I mentioned that some of your operatives are trained and some are not. This is where you send untrained operatives to get their training. So if you want to make somebody better at tech, they go to tech training. If you want to make them better at manipulation, they go to manipulation training. The other thing that these locations typically contain is items. So, if an operative is already trained, they can actually be sent here to learn how to make new items that you then put in your workshop to build. So, there's some synergy there. So, if an operative is already trained, um you can still use these locations because this is also where you send people to learn how to make items. So, for example, we have a bomb. Um that is always something that you learn by sending a trained operative over to the tech training area. And if they learn to make this bomb, it's going to go to the workshop where they can actually build it. And once they build it, it'll go to the safe house where you can actually use it. We have the jail key. Uh this is always going to go down here for manipulation training. Uh because you actually learn how to make it by talking your way into the jail and getting the key. Then you use your tech to actually construct the key. We've got the false papers, which are also always here at the uh country house for manipulation training. So, you definitely will want to get false papers at some point. They help you pass checks. Here at the insight training area, you're always going to be able to get a disguise and that will help you with insight checks.
Then there are a few items that are scenario specific. So, the pigeon coupe, you'll find out when you do the pigeon story. Uh the escape clan actually always comes to the church cellar because you meet up here and this is where you make your plan to escape uh arrest if something should happen to you. The radio here is actually specific to the intro scenario. So, we're going to put that one up here on the tech training location. And then the rest of these you'll just have to find out about as you play the game. Other things you can do in the town are go to the the train station to watch troops. So, if you end up with a troop in your draw bag, uh that is how you can pull them out. Um there's a whole jail to manipulate which we'll talk about in a future video, but basically if people end up in jail, they're going to get interrogated. You can either come and do things to keep them from falling into despair or maybe help lighten the interrogation that's going to happen to them or eventually you can try to break them out. But jail requires management.
It wastes time. It wastes resources and it's very very dangerous because if somebody breaks in here, they can turn in somebody else in your network. Here we have the church seller which I mentioned when I was putting out items. Um there is an escape plan that you can build here that will prevent arrest if you draw a troop from the bag. So, it's like a one free escape. You have to spend some time and resources to get it, though. The pub is where you come to recruit more operatives. So, we have our starting operatives, but if you need more, this is where you go to get them. The safe house is where you can send people to lay low. It will remove alert tokens from the bag. And so, if you've got kind of a messy bag and you want to to take some heat off of you, this is where you send people, but it does come at a time cost if you want to remove a non-trivial number of alert tokens.
And then we also here have the workshop. So, as I mentioned before, when you learn how to make items, they come here to actually be built. And then once you build them, they go to the safe house, which is where you stash all of your stuff. So, that's most of setup done. Uh, we have our lovely town. We have our hand. Uh, and now I'm going to walk you through the tokens that you use in the game and um how the and how to get yourself ready to fully start playing. So, first we have a draw bag and we're going to have our starting tokens in it. So, all of these skills that our our operatives have and their training, they're trying to use are going to be used are going to be deployed at these different locations where you need to pass skill checks. Um, so there are different tasks that require different skills and you are going to place your operatives in ways that hopefully get those tasks done, but maybe not depending on how you do with the draw bag. So, these are the starting tokens that you will put in. There are always 10 that you start with for your very first chapter of a story. And as you can see, we're getting a bag of mixed results. So checks obviously mean you're making progress towards finishing a task. That's very good. The X, of course, means no progress. You didn't make any progress at all. It's unfortunate, but unless you're absolutely failing a check, you trust me, sometimes you'll be relieved to only draw one of these. H.
This is progress with an alert. So basically, as you do your tasks, you are going to gain alert. You need stealth symbols to cancel it out, or else bad things happen. So at the end of each of the assignments you complete, you're going to need need to do an alert check. And uh that can add some troops to the bag, which we're going to see in just a moment. And then also time is a very very very tight resource in this game. So um you can succeed but waste some time. And you can also fail but waste some time. And those things are all going to come into play as we get rolling with this game. So that's the starting drawback, but trust me, it's not the ending drawback because you are going to mess this baby up. And what will you mess it up with? You're going to mess it up with alert and you're going to mess it up with troop tokens. And so these are going to form a supply off to the side until you are instructed to add these to your bag.
One of the ways you can lose this game, by the way, is to need to draw an alert or a troop token. Uh, but you find that you cannot because you have run out. So, be careful about how much trouble you make out in your town. I'm super happy, by the way, that these tokens are like the nice wood. I was not necessarily expecting that. And I was so delighted to open the prototype box and see we got really nice wood pieces. But these are going to go off to the side. Here's our alert. Here are troops. Um, may they not torture us too badly during our play. There are also a few other types of tokens that I'm going to lay out and show you what they do. These adorable birds are going to be used in the pigeon scenario and in no other. So, I'm going to set them aside for now, but eventually get birds. Hell yeah. And then these little markers are used in the jail. So, your operatives can go to jail. And when they're in jail, they can be interrogated. And when they're interrogated, they can experience a loss of hope, which is when you put these despair tokens on them. So, you have some despair tokens that are going to go to the jail. and also some interrogation tokens, which are these ominous looking little chairs over here. So, there are nine despair tokens in this game. There are three interrogation tokens.
Interrogation can only be so intense. Uh, but basically what's going to happen is these despair markers go on to operatives who are in jail. And sometimes you can manage to clear them off, but if that operative dies or breaks under their interrogation, they will leave the game and so will the despair markers that are on them. So, if there's ever a point where you run out of these and you can't place them anymore, then you will lose the game because there's just too much despair to go around and you've all lost hope. Your cell will fall apart. But these are markers that never go in the bag. They're here to track what's happening in jail. One marker we'll be using during actual gameplay, but these again are not drawn, are these progress markers. So if I'm working on an assignment and I get a check mark, I would say I would place the corresponding progress depending on what scale I was checking on the location where I'm doing the assignment so that I can see how far along I am uh compared to the number I need to meet. So for example, if I am doing break out of the jail, it's going to take one time and I need to make one blue progress. So you'll be seeing these shortly and then these babies are a real curse. Uh you'll see them all set out for the intro scenario once I get it fully ready for the next video. Uh but these are time tokens and these are what you are spending every time you send somebody to do an assignment. You only have a limited amount of time per chapter. Uh and in the intro, which is only one chapter, you have the time that you have and that's pretty much it. The only way to get more time is to build the bomb and blow it up for six time back for the discard.
But basically, time is an extremely limited resource and you are going to be spending it like crazy trying to get everything done. You're going to be wasting it depending on what you draw from the draw bag. And it's a very frustrating, frightening thing. And that was actually one of the big goals for David and me as we were making this game. We wanted to really emphasize the time pressure and how little space there is to get everything done, especially if somebody is in jail or if your organization is having problems. time is so so short and that's supposed to put a good amount of pressure on you and so trust me it will. So that's the quick tour of setup. Again, we have a couple more locations that are going to come out when I reconfigure this for the intro scenario. Uh but basically for the intro, your goal is to get into a chateau and figure out who is on a list of possible dissident inside. And so you can choose to get in there in a number of ways. You can come to the cafe to gather intelligence. You can follow a car along the local roads to try to figure out some plans for getting into that chateau. Or you can make a radio, which will let you flip both of these at the same time and make a choice. But you have to build an item first. So there are multiple ways to crack this code.
We're going to pick one and just try it out in the next video. But yes, this is just the briefest overview of Queen of Spies. I'm so excited to see this prototype. It is beautiful and it makes me really really happy to see so much work appear in this like physical form. Um, even though I've been designing games now since 2022, this is the first time I've actually held something in my hands um that is a publisher level version of something that David and I have made. And so this is a really really special moment for me and a really special video. And uh those of you who've been following me the whole journey, thank you so much. Those of you who are just discovering this, come along with me for the ride. Learning to be a game designer is super exciting and I would not change my decisions for the world. So here's just a look at the components and initial setup of Queen of Spies. I'm going to release a gameplay video soon so you can see how it works.
Um and yeah, I'm just so excited to see this. Um this will go live on Gamefound on December 4th. I'll put the link in the show notes. Um, but I can promise you a good time. I'm really, really, really proud of this. So, please like, subscribe, comment, ask questions, and most of all, happy gaming. Thanks y'all.