How to Solo: Queen of Spies (Intro Scenario)
Transcript
Hey gamers, this is Liz David from Beyond Solitire. And after a little bit of a break because I went to two conventions after I did a setup video for this game, I'm finally going to play the intro scenario for Queen of Spies. This is a game that is co-designed by me and David Thompson. It is about running a spy ring in World War I Belgium. It's heavily inspired, but it's not like a onetoone history. And in it, you are Alice and you are trying to accomplish your goals without ending up with a bunch of people in jail. And you also have a limited amount of time to do all of the things that you need to do. So, this is just going to be the introductory scenario. There are three larger stories within the game that are more challenging. Uh, but I just wanted to give like a demo of play and how the rhythm of the game works so you can get a sense of whether it's something that would interest you. Hopefully, yes, cuz it's my baby and I'm proud of it. But, you know, I'm a realist about these things. So, if you haven't watched my previous video, I'm just going to give you a very quick tour of the town of what we're trying to do. So, our main goal for this scenario is to either follow this car or gather intel so that we can flip these locations and learn about a chateau that contains a list of possible dissident. We could be on the list. We want to check it out.
Um, and so we need to gather our information. We'll flip these cards and then we're going to figure out how to get into the chateau and grab the information that we need. So these are introductory specific locations as you can see by the little symbol. This symbol right here that's just like an ID looking symbol is telling you that all of these locations are normal parts of the town and that they appear in every game. So my town tour always like just goes left to right. So over here we have the training areas. So this is the country house. These are three different little schools that you can send your operatives to. So you can do tech training here, insight training here, and manipulation training here. So here in the middle, this is where you kind of deal with troops and with jail. So right here we have train station. Um, this lets you watch troops and remove them from the bag, which decreases your odds of arrest.
This is the jail. Uh, if anybody ends up here, it is really bad. And I might simulate somebody ending up here towards the end of the video just so you can see how that would work. Uh, and then down here we have the church seller. This is where you make an escape plan. So if you draw a troop and you want to ignore it one time, this is the thing for you. And then over here on the right, uh, it's kind of our management of our stuff and our personnel. So the pub is where you go to recruit new operatives. Although I do not recommend recruiting too much because a large network can get hard to manage, so be careful. Um, then we have the safe house. This is where you go lay low. This is how you remove alert from the bag. And alert is something that goes in that increases the odds of troops ending up in the bag, which increases your odds of going to jail. So, this is a good way to cool down a situation that seems to be getting out of hand. And then you have the workshop.
And whenever we're going to build items, this is where we're going to put them. So, this location is kind of like a holding place for each item that you acquire. And you come here to build it. The items that we start with during this particular game are the false papers and the jail key. So, this is a way to improve your manipulation checks. This is a way to help break people out of jail if you end up with people there. Yikes. Um, here at the insight training area, you can learn how to make a disguise. And then at tech training, uh, you can learn how to make a bomb, which is available in every scenario, or a radio, which is introductory scenario specific. And we're actually going to try to do the radio pathway to success here just because I want to show youall how to build an item. You don't have to do it for this scenario. There's usually multiple pathways to victory, but I'll show you this one. So, a couple other things for you to see before we get started. This is our opening hand of operatives. These are Alice, who we always start with. She's our spy master.
And then I drew four more. So, we have Denique, Heidi, she should be on her untrained side. Rianne and Leon. So basically Alice and then one person from each of the different colored cells. They're also denoted by a symbol in the top left corner. Uh if you want to make sure that you're not mixing them up because you're color blind. So here's our opening hand. We're going to talk about all of this in detail. And then we have some tokens over here. And I'll just explain briefly what they are. So up here we have time. We have a very limited amount of time. This is um actually an increase from what the intro used to be because it was deemed too nasty of an introductory scenario. So if you want to try it the mean way uh just go with like 20 of these tokens, but we have 30 now. Um but this is our hard limit for completing this particular scenario. In future stories in the box as you play, you're going to have different time amounts per chapter, but running out of time will end a chapter for you. These are tokens that have to do with the jail. So if somebody goes to jail, um these interrogation markers will go on it to indicate how hot and heavy the interrogation is. And these despair markers will go on to operatives who are breaking slowly under interrogation, it can cause them to leave the game. And if you get too much despair accumulated and then out of the game, you will lose.
These are progress markers. So basically, as we do skill checks here, um even if we don't fully complete them, a lot of times you can leave progress on these locations and go back and finish later. So, this will help us indicate where we've been working and where we might need to go continue. And then under the bag here, we have nasty things that can go in. So, this is the success bag. It's currently got its array of starting tokens in it, which uh we can look at in a moment. Uh but you also have troop tokens and alert tokens. So, these are bad things that go in. Unfortunately, they're never good things that go in. David and I are just not those sorts of people. Um but, uh I think that makes the game spicier. Uh, and then over here, these extra operatives. These are people we could recruit. So, just to give you a quick look at the inside of the bag, here are starting tokens. You can see there's a slight difference in color between ones that get added later and ones that you start with. So, it's really easy to identify your starting tokens if you're resetting for a new game.
Uh, but they have an array of things on them. So, the check marks all mean progress. The X is no progress. A check in a clock means you made progress, but you waste a time. So you do have to discard a time from your your time marker supply over there. This is success, but you raised some alert. So you succeeded in what you needed to do, but you also drew attention, which can have some nasty consequences. And then this one is not only did you not make any progress, but you also wasted time. So even everything in the initial success bag is not great, but we'll figure out how to live with it. So now it's time to start walking through our turns. I'm just going to move these people out of the way until I decide if I decide to recruit one. All right. So, the first thing that you do every single round this game is played a round is assign operatives. If there are any operatives in your hand, they either have to go out or you have to spend a time token on them. And that represents having to manage your network. So, even somebody who's not on duty, you're still having to communicate with them and figure out where they should be. And so, no matter what, everybody in your hand is going to cost you some time. So, just so you know, you cannot game the system and hold people back in an attempt to get them all back in sync. You're gonna have to get tricksier. So, one thing I want to do is, as I mentioned, um, we're trying to get into the chateau. So, there's a couple ways to do that. We can come up here and follow this car on the local roads.
We can come up here and we can gather intel at the cafe or we can try to build the radio and then once we activate it, we flip both of these cards over. So, I think what I'd like to do, just so I can show you how to build a radio, is come over here and get it. To do that, I need to send a trained operative over here to Tech Training. So, since this is the first round of a new game, the only operative who's coming in here trained is Alice. So, as you can see, Alice is our boss lady. So, she is fully trained in all the skills. So, she's got two in manipulation, two in insight, and two in tech. And she has a stealth marker up here, which is going to impact how she gets through her skill checks. So, Alice can do anything she wants to do. Right now, what she's going to do is she's going to go over to the country house and she's going to learn how to make a radio.
So, we are going to put her here from looking at the location that she's going to go over here and she's going to take two time and that she needs to make one progress in order to grab that radio plan and put it in the workshop. So, we're going to put Alice here technically here if we're going barto bar. As you can see, she's tech trained. So, there's a tech bar right here. Um, and we are going to spend the time it's going to take for her to complete this assignment. So, we're going to put two time over here. So Alice is busy and she is going to try to make us a radio. I still have four operatives left to assign though. So let's think about where they go. First of all, I would really like for people to do the escape plan because I like having an escape plan. It's just smart. Um so let's go ahead and send let's send Ren to the church seller.
And then let's send and then we're going to go ahead and send Leon to the church seller. Uh, so Rianne and Leon have gone down here and there's something to note about them. So part of what's going on here is that Rianne and Leon are from different cells. So you can see that by the color. You can also see that by the fact they have a different symbol in the top left corner of their cards. And Alice is not here to help them work that out. So, whenever you have two operatives who are going uh to a location without Alice there to coordinate them as the spy master, then they are going to add one alert to the bag because it's sort of like, "Oh, are you who I think you are? Oh, are you who I think?" You know, the awkwardness of running into somebody that you don't fully know or fully trust um is going to mess you up when you arrive together. So Rienne and Leon are going to work fine together once they make it to this location, but they add a little bit of alert to the success bag uh because they don't really know each other and Alice isn't there to help make that smooth. So the first bad token went into this bag. Um so looking at the church seller, we're also going to assign our time. Uh this is a location where the operatives that are assigned there are automatically successful.
They're going to successfully build the escape plan, but it's going to take three time for them to do it. And the instructions up here will tell you you need two people to tango to make that plan. So, we're going to go ahead and take three time. And we're going to pop it right here on the church seller. Uh, and we will be making an escape plan soon. I still have two people left. Let's think about what we might like to do with them. So, I think what I want to do is send them both to school. Um, so they could train. I would like to send Heidi over here to insight training, which will cost two time. And then I'd like to send Denique over here to manipulation training. That's also going to cost two time. As you can see, this time it gets spent fast, y'all. So, what training is going to do for these ladies hopefully is, as you can see, unlike Alice, who had both of these squares filled in on her card, Heidi here has one pale blue square for her insight.
That means that she's not trained yet. When she is, we'll get to flip her card and we'll get to see her train side where everything is filled in and she also like looks cooler and more badass, obviously. So, these ladies are over here trying to get better at what they do. So, with all of that, we have assigned all of our operatives. My hand is empty. I do not have anybody in my hand. So, the next thing that we're going to do is we are going to remove time. So, we're going to take one time marker off of each of these locations. Easy enough. And then we're going to put these in a discard pile. We cannot put them back into the main time supply or else we're going to get off on our accounting of time and we do not want that. So, these are just going to go over here. Time discard shoved off to the side.
Then if there were any places that have operatives at them, uh, but all the time markers have been removed, what that means is that it's time to resolve the assignment and see how they do. But that isn't going to happen yet because there's still time on everything. Then phase four of any round is to check the jail and see if any interrogation needs to happen. But currently, nobody is in jail. Nobody's going to get interrogated. So we're going to go back to step one, assign operatives. I don't have any operatives by hand. We move through. We go to step two. Remove time. Oh, here we go. Now, we've taken some time off and we have three places where operatives are present and where there are no time markers there anymore. That means it's time to resolve these assignments.
Meanwhile, at the church seller, everybody's still kind of in action here. And what that means is that, as you might have noted, your operators can kind of get out of sync with each other. And that's really important because if you need to send two people to an assignment together, but they're on different assignments that get them out of rhythm, you're going to figure out, you're going to have to figure out how to get them coordinated again. So that is a key part of the game and how to play it well. So, uh, we get to resolve all of our resolvable assignments in the order of our choosing. And so, basically the way this will work is that you always have to resolve your assignments one at a time. You have to resolve them for one operative at a time. And then also some of these places like for example the local roads you need both tech and insight in order to succeed at that location. You need to do all of the checks for one skill type before moving on to the other. And so as long as you're doing everything one at a time and moving doing things completely before moving on, then you're going to be just fine. So I'm going to prioritize and this is something I recommend to everyone. Um, like a strategy tip. Do the thing that's the most important while you have the cleanest bag. So, this bag is as clean as it's going to get this round. Um, so I'm gonna do Alice first because I really, really, really want the radio.
The other thing to think about as you're drawing, um, is who has stealth because stealth makes it more likely you're going to succeed in an alert check, which we're going to talk about at the end of our first skill check with Alice. And having stealth makes it less likely that you're going to add bad things to the bag and then make problems for future checks during the same round. And then Denique down here, she has no stealth and I just want her trained because it seemed like a good thing to do with her at the moment. So this is probably the least important check we're going to save her for last. Although she could seriously do some damage to us, too, if she does badly at school. So let's hope her time at the country house is being well spent. But we're going to do our first skill checks. So, first we're going to do Alice. Alice is a trained operative in tech. And that means that I can choose how many tokens I want to draw for her. I need to get one progress on this assignment. And what that means is I need to draw at least one check mark from this bag for the skill check.
So, how many tokens do I want to draw? Normally, if I need to make one progress, I will choose to draw two tokens. But Alice could choose to draw up to three. But you have to declare in advance. So, we're going to say two tokens for Alice. Let's let's go ahead and draw for her. So, we're going to reach in the success bag and we're going to pull two tokens. All right. So, the first one is a progress. Um, I could stop here except that I declared in the beginning I'm going to draw two. So, overdrawing uh is something you have to be careful about in this particular game. So, just note that. Okay. So, we got a progress with an alert. That's actually not bad at all because uh we're going to perform an alert check in a moment. But importantly, Alice has succeeded at her task. The assignment is successfully complete because she only needed one progress and she got two, one for each of these check marks. She did draw an alert. So, after you do your skill check, you need to do an alert check. And what that means is you look at the number of alert signs that you drew. So, this right here, this little caution sign, that's an alert, the little exclamation point, and you compare it to the number of stealth symbols that are in the top right of the cards that you've played.
So, Alice has stealth, as you can see the little hat and glasses in that top corner. So, one stealth cancels out one alert. We're good to go. If there had been more alert than there were stealth icons on the cards, then we would add a troop to the bag because the activity has drawn attention. Fortunately, however, Alice is scot-free. So, she succeeds. These progress tokens come up. These tokens come back to the bag and Alice gets to do the success result on the card. So, if trained, she can take an item to the workshop and she will do just that. We're going to take the radio. We're going to put it in the workshop so we can build it now. So basically, we went to the country house to learn how to make a radio. The radio now comes into the workshop where we can now actually make it. And then Alice, who has completed her assignment, comes back to our hand and we're going to have to reassign her at the top of the next round when you assign operatives. Good job, Alice.
So that is one assignment resolved. We have two more to resolve. So we're going to see how Heidi here does at insight training. Heidi is untrained in Insight. So Alice had a choice to draw between zero and three tokens. Heidi as an untrained operative has the skill, but she has to draw two tokens. She's like a puppy who doesn't know how to stop. Um, and so basically we have to draw two for her. There is no choice here. We're just going to draw two. Token one. Okay, so she got a check mark with an alert. So she has made the progress that she needs. She's going to succeed. So that's good. We still have to draw that second token. Uhoh. So, she did get another progress, but she also drew a second alert. So, what that means is that there are two alerts here.
There's only one stealth symbol. So, during her alert check, which happens after this, all these tokens are pulled. Um, she's drawn too much attention. So, she was doing too much weird stuff on the way to or from this country house. She did something to draw attention. And now this troop is going to go into the success bag. And we are officially on notice that somebody could go to jail as a result of a bag draw now, which is very scary. But for now, everyone's okay. Um, these progress tokens come back. These tokens go back to the bag. Um, we have trained Heidi, so she's going to flip to her better side. Look at her. She's looking super stylish as she eaves drops on people. And this is gonna come back to our hand.
Okay, so Heidi and Alice have made it back in from the cold. Uh Leon and Rian are just still out here, so they're okay. And then we're going to see how Denique does in school. Please don't try to manipulate somebody and end up in jail, Denique, but it could happen. All right, so again, she's untrained. We have to draw two tokens for her. Just period. First token progress, but alert. So, that's not good because she's This is definitely going to add another troop to the bag. That's not not hot. And just a regular old progress. So, everybody's doing really well. Uh there are more checks than X's in the bag at the beginning, just so you know. Um it's the alert that'll really start to kill you. So, she got her two progress. These can come up. These come back to the bag. Well, not yet. Um we're going to do our alert check. And again, there is no stealth symbol here. There is an alert. More alert than stealth means, yay, a troop goes in the bag. That's That's great, guys.
Good stuff. These come back and Denique flips over to her train side. So, at least Denique is like better than before and she is ready to rock. So, she is going to come back to our hand as well. So, now that we've done this, we're are we are going to need to figure out what comes next. So we're So we had assigned operatives, we removed time, we resolved assignments, and this would be step four, handle any interrogations, but there's nobody in the jail. So there's no interrogations that get handled. We're back to the top of the next round. Assign operative. So everybody needs to go back out and do their stuff. So I think Alice's job is to get her butt over here and start working on the radio. So Alice is going to do radio work. The radio requires two progress and it eats up two time. So, we're going to take two time and put those on Alice.
Not bad. Then, we've got to do something about our troop situation. I am personally a little bit concerned. So, we are going to send Heidi to the train station. The train station takes one time and requires two progress. So, we're going to just watch the troops here and hope that nothing too bad happens to us. Um, but it is very very important that we handle the amount of just garbage in our draw bag or else it's going to get really really nasty. On that note, we're going to send Denique over here to the safe house. And the safe house is a place where any operative can go and you spend one time per operative and they can remove um one alert from the bag when they resolve their assignment per operative who is there. So Denique is going to get to remove one alert from the bag, which is good because there's one alert in the bag right now. So everybody's out. All the operators from our hand have been assigned. We're go back to step two. Pull a time up.
Okay, so once again, we've got multiple assignments to resolve, but in this case, we actually only have to draw from one of them. So the church seller is automatically successful. So it says on the card, we're going to move the escape plan to the safe house. and no skill check is required. So, our ladies automatically succeeded at their excellent planning in the creepy church cellar. So, that means that Leon and Rianne come back to our hand and the escape plan is going to go to the safe house, which means if we draw a troop, we could choose whether to use it to help somebody evade that troop. So, that's pretty good. Denique will automatically succeed at the safe house. So, this card also will say no skill check is required.
So, we can remove one alert token from the success bag for each operative assigned here. So, she's going to come back to our hand and we're going to remove the alert token that's in this bag. So, this is going to go back to the supply. That means our draws are going to be a little bit more likely to succeed. We got like a cleaner bag. And now we have to resolve the only person we're we're actually going to draw for, and that is Heidi. So Heidi needs to get two progress on the train station in order to succeed here. And if she does, then she gets to remove a troop token from the success bag. She's trained. She could draw up to three tokens. So the question is, do I want to draw two and just kind of make some progress, but be cautious? Or do I want to draw three and try to guarantee that we get a troop out of the bag? The problem is that we could then draw a troop from the bag and send Heidi to jail instead of actually getting rid of the troop. or it could force us to use our escape plan, which I don't know if I want to do yet. So, I'm kind of in a tough decision spot. I think we're going to play somewhat conservatively. And we're gonna let Heidi just work on the train station and we're just going to take that risk.
Okay, so the first token we drew of the two is a fail and she wasted a time. So, she's like looking around and it's just not really doing a lot for us. That kind of stinks. This one is a success, but she wasted some time. So, basically, our time is ticking down. That's not great. Uh, but we did make one progress. So, we did not make the two progress that we needed to actually get a troop token out of the bag. We did make one progress. Nothing happens yet. So, if you look at each card, it'll have a check and what happens. And then if there's a fail condition, there will be an X and what happens. This one has only a check. So, nothing's going to happen because Heidi failed. She's good. She's just going to come back to our hand. And we are going to leave this progress token here. And we know that she's like part way to success.
And the good news is that we didn't draw any alerts. We also didn't add any troops to the bag. So, we're still good. So, with all of our assignments resolved for this round, here's what we're going to do. We are going to go ahead and send Heidi back to the train station. It's going to cost us another time, but we're going to try to get a troop out of there. I'm just very concerned about it. Um, then we have these other ladies who can go somewhere. So, if Heidi succeeds, there's going to be an alert token in the success bag. So, we should send someone to the safe house. I think that we could send Ren to tech training so that she'll just get better at stuff. It seems good. Um hm. I'm going to send Denique to the safe house for one time.
And I'm going to hold Leon back because there's nowhere I aggressively want to send her right now. So I'm going to put her basically still in my hand, but it's going to cost me a time. So she doesn't just get to hang back for free. I still have to put a time on her. But I feel like that's worth it to not send her somewhere and get her involved in a check I don't want her involved in. So that's all the oper operives are assigned. Now I'm going to draw one time token off of each of the assignments. Yay. So Leon's back clear. Alice can try to build the radio. Denique can remove an alert from the safe house. Um and then the train station is going to be back in action. And then Rian is still in school. She's just hanging over there. So that's not a bad thing for her. So now we have to resolve all the places where I have operatives. But there are no time tokens left, so it's time. So, we're going to do Heidi first this time and see if we can get a troop out of the bag.
So, let's draw two again. I think that that's a good idea. Okay, so she got one progress. Oh, I wish I could stop now, but I can't cuz I said I was drawing two. Okay, couldn't could be worse. So, no progress, but she wasted time. Oh, Heidi. However, the good news is that she survives her alert check. No new troops go to the bag. The progress is going to come off and we're going to do the success text. So this says remove a troop token from the success bag and place in the supply. So there were two troops in here. We get one of them out. So he goes back to supply by uh and then however we had to place one alert token in the success bag. So we still got kind of noticed at the train station thematically. So, it's not all good, but it was helpful because alert will get a troop in the bag. A troop will get you in jail. So, Heidi's completed her task. She's going to come back and we're going to add these back to the bag.
Then, Denique is going to do us a big favor. She at the safe house gets to just remove one alert token from the bag, which is why I sent her to the safe house. I knew I was going to add an alert from this probably, and now she's going to pull it out. So, that alert token goes right back to the supply. Haha. Good job, me. And now we have the cleanest possible bag. There is a troop in there. So, if we draw it though, we have an escape plan. I'm playing a little risky here. Um, but Alice is going to try to build this radio. So, let's see how we do. We're going to pull all three tokens that she could pull because she's trained. She can pull three. We're just going to risk it here. Risk it for the biscuit. Okay, a no progress. Alice, come on, girl.
A troop. But if I had not built that escape plan, we would be in trouble. If you end a chapter with Alice in jail, uh, guess what? You lose the game. She's your spy master. Fortunately, we have this lovely escape plan. And we are going to use it, baby. So, this will tell you that when you use the escape plan, uh, if you draw a troop, you get to return it to the supply, ignore it, and draw a replacement token for it. So, uh, yeah, that's a great idea. We're going to take the escape plan away from the safe house. We're going to put it back in the church seller where we're going to have to build it again if we want another one. So, it takes a big time investment in a lot of people, but that was worth it for me. So, this guy goes back. We're draw another token. Okay, a progress. We need one more progress on the radio.
Come on, Alice. Come on. Are you the queen of spies or what? She is. She is the queen of spies. Um, she has succeeded at making the radio. We needed two progress, which we got. Uh, and in the alert check after all this, we have one alert symbol, but also one stealth. So, she cancels it out. We are good to go. No new troops get added to the bag. Okay, so this is some good progress for us. These are going to come back to the bag. Alice comes back to our hand. We get to put the radio into the safe house. Uh, and then we can use it. So, we're just going to use the radio right away. We're going to flip over the cafe and the local roads. And then we're going to discard this card. So, normally items sit in the safe house for a longer period of time. The radio is unique and that you can just use it right away. U, but we wanted you to be trained to put it in the safe house because that's where all items ultimately go. So, we made the radio in the workshop. You put it in the safe house because you have it. You choose to use it. This gets discarded.
And now we're going to flip over the local roads and the cafe. And we now know what's up in terms of getting into the chateau. So, we have our options. Now, let's have a look at these. Our first option for the chateau is to try to sweet talk our way in. So, if we get two insight progress and two manipulation progress, we can sweet talk our way to the chateau. And if we succeed, we are victorious. If we fail, uh, we don't get to keep any of our progress markers on the card. That's what remove all progress markers means. And we're going to have to put two troop tokens in the success bag because somebody knows that we were trying to get into the chateau and it increases like the presence of the authorities. That's not good. So, we better win. Um, we also now have the opportunity to break into the chateau. So, it's another option. So, again, uh we need two tech for this one and two insight. It only does take one time, though, so that's good. These are both little shorties. Um so, if we succeed, we get a victory. And if we fail, we're going to put two troop tokens in the success bag and remove all progress markers. So, again, it's you better get it or else you're just going to have to fully try again from scratch.
But this puts us in a position to try to win the introductory scenario. And we've got plenty of time left. Theoretically, it's possible that things could go extremely wrong still. Um, do note that the original, I think I mentioned it had 20 time. So, we would have been like really desperate at this point in the original version of the introductory scenario. If you want to play the OG hard version, that's what you should do to yourself. Um, okay. But we've got these four wonderful ladies who are going to, I think, just go for it. So Rian is she's in training. I don't really want to wait for her to come back. Um there are no cops in the bag right now, which means that I'm in a potentially very good place to try to succeed here. So let's look at everybody's abilities and kind of figure out what they could do and like what they're best suited for. So Alice can do anything. So she's just all around excellent. Denique has manipulation skill, which is needed for sweet talking our way to the chateau.
Heidi is trained in insight, so she could go either way. She could do the sweet talk or the breakin. So, I think we're leaning sweet talk here with these ladies. And then Leon, she's not trained yet. Her primary skill is tech. However, she has the ability to go draw tokens for manipulation. And so, I think that sweet talk in the chateau is our best option. and we're just going to try to go over here and get it. So, basically, this is something you haven't seen before, and I'm super glad that we're doing it because I wanted to make sure that you saw. You can send multiple operatives to multiple tasks at these assignments at the same time. And this is going to be our first multi-assignment, but it's going to be really common in later like chapters and stuff and stories of this game. So, let's send our ladies out. So, we're going to send Leon over here to handle sweet talk on the manipulation end. She will have to draw two tokens, but that's okay. Let's go. Let's go ahead and send Denique over here to assist. So, Denique is trained. Leon is not. So, we have one trained and one non-trained operative handling the sweet talk manipulation part of the chateau breakin. And then Alice and Heidi are both trained in insight. So, we are going to put them over here on the insight task. So, there were two tasks that we have to do. We're going to have to get two progress in each and it's only going to cost us one time though. So, we might be about to kill this. All the operatives have been assigned. We're going to pull up time.
I mean, so Rian, I'm not going to worry about right now. We're going to just try to get this task done and let's see if we pull it off. Maybe, maybe not. Okay. So, here's what we're going to do. We are going to start over here with manipulation. And the reason that we're going to do that is because Leon has to draw two tokens. She's the person I have the least options for. So, I'm just going to draw her two tokens right away. And we're going to see how this how this goes. So, she got a no progress with a time discard and a progress. So, we got one manipulation progress on the chateau. Now, Denique is going to draw for progress on the manipulation task. She only needs one more, so I'm going to draw two tokens for her. I could draw between zero and three, as you know. So, if Leon had succeeded right away, I would draw zero tokens for Denique. But that's not an option. I'm going to have to draw something for her. So, let's draw two. Make try to try to clinch this.
Okay, so no progress progress with an alert. But hey, you know what? That's actually pretty good because it means she's pulled another no progress out of the bag. We are almost certainly going to succeed at this at this point statistically. So Heidi is going to draw two tokens. We'll just see how she does. Okay, so she got a progress with alert and a no progress. And at this point, we're just going to draw all the final tokens from the bag for Alice to make I'm pretty sure that this is just a guaranteed win, but you know. Yes. So everything in here was a success. So we would have failed an alert check, but it's the end of the scenario. So oh well. Uh we get our success for our intro.
Nice and easy. And we have gotten ourselves into the chateau. So hooray, we have victory. We have won the introductory scenario. And then you would set up the next story in the game for the next one. So hopefully that gave you a good sense of how to play the game. There is one more thing I want to show you before we end this video just because it is actually pretty likely to come up. I'm just fairly wily at this game because I played it a few hundred times. Um um so I want to just show you what happens if somebody is in jail. So we'll just put Rian back. We technically would have had to draw for her, but that would have been fine, too. Okay. So, um, the one thing that we haven't talked about is what happens if somebody goes to jail. So, we've been going through all of these interrogation phases, uh, but there's never been anybody to interrogate. So, as you know, you assign operatives, you set your time down on a location, uh, then you pull time back, you you resolve any assignments that need to be resolved after the time is removed. Uh, and then you check the seizures interrogation. So, how does that happen?
Let's say that Denique has been here. She's trying to recruit somebody at the pub. Let's just say the final time has come up off of the pub and during her draw, oh no, a troop comes out of the bag. If that happens, you immediately take this troop and any other troops that are in the bag and you put them in the supply. Basically, it's a way to get heat off of you so you don't just have everybody arrested on the same turn cuz that's no fun. Also, these troops get lazy after they get a win. And so we that's thematically what's happening there. So Trip comes back to the supply. Denique goes over here on jail and immediately an interrogation marker gets added to the jail. So then at the end of the round after all the assignments have been resolved, you're going to do an interrogation check. And basically what that means is for every operative that's in the jail, you're going to see how they do under interrogation. So right now there's one interrogation marker here. We would draw one token from the success bag for Zenique.
And if it has a progress symbol on it, the check, she's good. She withstands interrogation and she's super tough. However, let's say that the bag draw was worse. Let's say that we drew this no progress discard time marker. You ignore the part about discarding time. When you're doing interrogation, it's just does it have a check or not? This one doesn't. So, what that means is that she is going to get a little bit of despair on her. And at the end of the interrogation, you're going to add another interrogation marker. So, things heat up from round to round the longer you leave people here. There's a maximum of three interrogation markers. Um, which is good. Um, because it can get out of hand very quickly. So, let's say that you've done nothing to help Denique. She's just here. Uh, and we draw two more tokens.
So again, one she withstands, one she adds another despair. If a third despair gets added to Denique, she's going to break. And what that means is that she leaves the game, all the despair markers on her leave the game. And if you run out of despair markers, you your network just gives up and you lose the game. So we do not want her to get a third despair. The other thing that happens is she turns in somebody that she knows. If she breaks under interrogation, that means she's either going to betray somebody who is another operative in her cell. So, if we've recruited somebody else from this green cell, then she could turn them in, or the only other person that she knows is Alice. So, Denique can rent Alice out and land her in jail. So, that can be really, really rough. If you end a chapter with Alice in jail, you will lose the game. If Alice dies in jail, you will lose the game. So, this can get very out of hand very, very quickly. uh there's some things that you can do to manage it.
Also, I will note that if you draw a troop from the bag when you're doing an interrogation, the operative is immediately killed and they just leave the game immediately. They don't do anything to turn anybody in because they got killed, but they will die and it's very upsetting. Um by design, of course. Um so, when somebody's in the jail, there are a few things that you can do to manage that. One is that you can come over here and smuggle things into the jail. This is an insight check. And so you come over here and you do an insight skill check. And for every insight progress marker you get on that skill check, uh you can remove a despair marker uh from each person in jail. So basically, even if there's multiple people with despair, it's like you get them a care package in somehow and they all feel better. Uh but you do get a little bit of alert. So you have to be careful about how you do this.
The other thing that you can do is you can try to decrease the heat of the interrogation itself. So you can send somebody over here with a manipulation ability to talk to the guards. And so here for each manipulation progress marker they place, you can remove an interrogation marker. So you can go sweet talk the guards and kind of like decrease the heat on the people who are currently in jail. So you can kind of keep that interrogation from happening in the first place, but it's going to cost you time and resources every time. So that can be really nasty and it does add alert to the bag because again, why are you hanging out at the jail? They're going to notice that. The other thing that you can do is you can orchestrate an escape. There are two ways to escape from the jail. One is to organize a breakout. To do that, you send somebody down to manipulation training. Uh basically what they're doing is they learn how to talk somebody into telling them about the jail key. Uh and so you get the jail key and you put it in the workshop and then you make it. Then you can use the jail key here to try to break people out of jail. So it's a multi-step process. It's not easy to just go and break somebody out of jail.
Your other option is to build the bomb, but the bomb is risky. So, if you blow up the bomb, there's two things you can do with it. You can cause such a big distraction that you get six time back from the discard pile. So, it's a way to like bail yourself out if you're running out of time. Or you can use the bomb on the jail, but you have to draw from the success bag to see whether the people who are escaping as a result of that bomb live. Because again, if you're blowing up part of a jail, somebody could die. So, people ending up in jail can become a major problem very quickly. uh that is by design. Uh it can collapse your entire network or it can like eat up so many of your resources that it's wasting time and stressing you out while you're trying to get your main mission done. So just because we were smart this time and didn't end up in jail doesn't mean that it's not a major issue in a lot of games. Um and of course that is on purpose. There is in fact a story about rescuing prisoners of war that is very much devoted to dealing with people in the jail and helping get them out.
And so that is an overview of Queen of Spies. Uh I really hope that you enjoyed this. I am really, really proud of the work that David and I have done for this game. Uh and it will be on Gamefound on December 4th. So I'll be releasing this video uh very close to then. Thank you so much for watching everybody. Please like, subscribe, comment, check out the Gamefound campaign. Uh and most of all, happy gaming.