How to Solo: Queen of Spies (Pigeon Story, Ch.1)
Transcript
Hey, gamers. This is Liz Davidson from Beyond Salt and I'm here with my partner in crime David Thompson or in this case my partner in being a spy because we're going to show off a scenario of Queen of Spies to you. How you doing today, David?
I'm good.
I'm I'm so excited to see you next week.
I know. I know. Gen Con days away. It's going to be awesome.
So, for the record I'm intending to run this video on the first day of Gen Con. So, if you are at Gen Con and you're just kind of browsing video stuff, be aware that Queen of Spies can go be picked up at the Salt and Pepper booth. This is going to come out on retail drop date. So, I'm I'm excited about that. So, in celebration of this David and I are going to play the first chapter of the first story of Queen of Spies and I have a couple other videos about it that I'll put in the show notes, but we just wanted to kind of show people again how it gets run. David, do you want to do the overview?
Sure. Yeah, so Queen of Spies, this is a game set in World War I where we are taking the role this is a solid purely solitary game. We are taking the role of a leader of a spy cell like operating in a small town in Belgium occupied by the Germans. And so, we are Alice and Alice we are running our our little network which consists of four different cells. You can see they're all divided here and they have a different symbol and they have kind of a little different color color scheme. We're going to have at the beginning of the game we're going to have one member of each of these cells and our and under Alice's instruction.
And one key thing just like would be the actual case Alice does not Alice coordinates all the actions, but the each individual cell does not know each other. I mean, that's that's for their own safety, right? To limit how much knowledge each group has. And so, uh that's why they're colored differently. And we won't get into all the details now, but if we were to recruit more members of a different cell, um they have the ability to work together in a little bit more cohesion. Uh but if throughout the course of our misadventures today, uh we have different members from different cells working together, it's going to cause a little extra attention, right? Because they don't they're not familiar with each other uh going into that mission. So, that sort of sets the stage. Uh we should say that Queen of Spies has a a little intro scenario. That's not what we're playing today. We're going to play the first like you said, the first first part of the first mission.
It It has three full missions. Each of those missions has three parts, and they continue into one another, right? Seamlessly. So, um so, we're just playing the first part of the first mission.
Yes. Uh so, our first mission is something I became very passionate about while researching it, uh which is pigeons. Uh my boyfriend lives in fear that one day we'll move into a property where I can have pigeons, and he'll have to deal with pigeons all day. Uh but, um I learned a lot about messenger pigeons uh from doing this scenario. And in basically each chapter, you're going to develop your intelligence network of pigeons. In the first chapter though, you just have to acquire the pigeons. So, uh here's our town with a bunch of locations, but the place where we're doing things that are related to our goal for the mission is special to this chapter. If you look at the bottom right corner, you have 1 2 3 and a picture of a pigeon. This is present for the entirety of the pigeon scenario. And it's a sketchy back alley where you're going to get birds.
Which I think sounds like a really great time.
Uh and then we've got these lovely pigeon pieces. Um and we've got um a pigeon coop that's been added to the map. So, these are things that are specific to the mission, but I'll also give a tour of the town because um in each like there's just a base town that you're existing in throughout as well. So, I kind of like to go column by column. These are places where you can send your operatives. So, um the first place that you can send your operatives um is the country house. And these are all the country house, but this also gives us a chance to talk about their skills and what it means to be trained and untrained. So, if you have these new operatives in our hand who we've been cultivating, you'll see that their colors are also tied to these squares on the sides of the card that have different symbols in them. And these symbols represent the skills that they're able to bring to specific tasks in the game.
Um and each of them is able to improve in one of those areas that's like their dominant area. So, there are three different skill types. We have tech, red, we have insight, which is blue. It's kind of like your ability to read a situation. And we have manipulation, which is green. And it's kind of like having the gift of gab. You can talk your way out of a lot of things. Um and so, these are places where each of our operatives can go to get trained. We'll talk a little bit more about it, but basically if you look at Sneak here, she has a base ability in manipulation, but if we were to train her, she would flip and be fully trained in manipulation. So, we're going to kind of see like what that ends up looking like um as part of our adventure here.
So, this is where you go to get trained. If you have trained operatives, they can also be sent to pick up items. So, the bomb is a good one to get if you want to make some trouble. Uh we have the lovely disguise, very good. Um and if you need some jail keys or some false papers, you might also decide to go to manipulation training as a trained operative in order to like pick that stuff up. In the middle, I kind of think of this as like heat management. So, up here we have the train station we can watch troops. If you kind of know what they're doing, you can avoid them and stop stop the lower the chances of being arrested by them. Um so, we have a bag that we're going to be pulling from for checks and alert and then troops go into that bag and as you as you kind of gain notoriety and you could get popped for an arrest. And so, this is a way to try to mitigate that.
Down here, we have the escape plan in the church cellar. So, here's the church cellar. Here's the actual plan, kind of nice. Uh this is for when a you do pull a troop out of the bag and you could get arrested. You can you could escape it one time using the escape plan. Uh and then here in the middle, we've got um the jail. And the jail is where you go when uh you do get arrested and it's really bad. So, if you go to the jail, you're going to get interrogated. You might succumb to despair. It's a rough time. Um but, there are different things that you can do here. So, if you send operatives to the jail, they're usually there to kind of tend to people who've been arrested either to lower the heat by talking to the guard and making it less likely they're going to get interrogated.
Trying to raise spirits by smuggling stuff into the jail or uh slipping by to try to steal a copy of the key so that they can do a breakout. And then over here on the right, uh we have these lovely locations. This is where you recruit people. You go to the pub and talk people up. Just say, "Hey, feeling uh being part of a resistance movement?" Um that's a normal conversation. Uh here's the safe house where you lay low. So, if you get alert in the bag and you want to cool it off, this is the place to send people. And then here's the workshop. So, when you acquire items, it means that you've learned how to make them. They come to the workshop first. You build them and then they come to your safe house where you can use them. So, basically teach stuff, deal with the man, do spy things like recruiting and laying low and building items.
Does that make sense, Steven?
Yep, absolutely.
Uh so, and again, we've got our lovely back alley, which I'm just going to pull down with our lovely pigeons. All right, do you want to show them how the bag is set up for checks?
Yeah, I Yes. Yeah, let's do that and then remind me I just want to talk a little bit about like going into a brand new mission and like how to approach it, right? Because one thing that that's it's not unique to this game, obviously, but one thing that's like uh interesting about this game is there's no right or wrong approach and there's a lot of different directions you can start with, especially when you think in terms of this is just the first part of a three-part mission and you're going to have a lot of different pressures, right? Not it's not just about getting pigeons. There's a lot of other considerations. So, but yeah, let's look at the bag. Um so, I'm going to take out the contents of the bag so we can talk through it. So, in this game, everything you're going to do uh anytime you go to a location and you're trying to resolve it to see if you're successful or not, you're going to be pulling tokens from this bag.
And there are a mixture of tokens here that feature successes, which are checks, failures, which are X's, time symbols, which remove time, and time is the single most critical resource of the game, and then these little exclamation points, which are alert. And so, over simplification, we'll talk about it in depth as we start to make checks in here, but if you go to a location and let's say you need two successes, uh failures don't count against that. They just mean you don't get a success. So, it's not like it offsets a success. You're looking for a number of checks of any combination equal to the number of successes you need at a location to complete it. And again, as we step through it, we'll get into more detail there. So, that's really what you're looking for. You You obviously don't want fails because those are not successes. That's bad. You don't really want these time symbols because you'll be wasting time, and time is again at a premium. And then lastly, and again, we'll get into more of this cuz we'll see it in action. These alert symbols mean, yes, you did make progress at what you were trying to do, so you got a success, but you're starting to starting to draw the attention of police. And so, the more of those you have, the more likely you are to add troops to the bag.
And if you add troops to the bag, you're going to be going to jail. One thing you'll note, and I we're going to foot stomp this because we want people to understand what they're getting into when they play this game.
Yes.
This is not a bag builder.
No.
foot stomp, foot stomp. When people play bag builders, deck builders, they think, I'm going to have a bad bag and I'm going to make it really good. That is not this game. This is not, you know, um uh what's the Clacksburg Quindlenburg or something like that, right?
Right.
This is the best it gets, folks.
Yeah. Yeah, it will never ever ever be better than what it starts out as. Every token you ever add to the bag is only going to make things worse. This is a game where we very intentionally want you to feel the pressure of running a spy network, and the more you successful you are at accomplishing your tasks, the more heat is going to be on you, and there are lots of different ways in the game to mitigate bad stuff going into the bag, but you can't make it better. You're not going to get, you know, superhuman powers that can offset the the troops being in the bag or anything like that.
No. I mean, realistically speaking, um what's so hard about being a spy in in reality? Like, you know, the people that inspired this game mostly died horribly. It's that the more things you do, you might get better at the job, but you're also getting more exposure. Like, spies just can't remain in the shadows forever if they're really, really getting out there.
Yep. And you can play you can play things super safe in this game and do all the things to mitigate risk and take all the time in the world and you will absolutely fail because you'll run out of time being so careful that you're not actually accomplishing anything. So everything is a trade-off between managing your time and taking taking the appropriate risk.
Yes. So speaking of um yeah, we're not going to let you just kind of run around and do whatever you want. That's what I would do if I were a spy and that's why I would fail. Um but you have this is the time up here. This is the most limited resource and your most precious in the entire game. Um and so uh for each chapter you're going to get a certain amount of time. For chapter one I do believe you only have 20 time. So we have a limited amount of time to work with. So for each chapter you do get a bit more time but you have to figure out how to budget this very, very tight time. So uh David, do you want to just like play a bit and kind of talk through what we're doing?
Yeah. Yeah. And And one thing we'll do before we actually make our first summon I'm going to go back to what I mentioned before because we have a very like before we assign our first operative and what we're going to do here is the first thing we're going to do is assign our five operatives to different locations. We have to think big picture. What's our goal? Our goal is to get pigeons from the back alley and get them into our pigeon coop. Uh we know that long-term we want to train those pigeons and then we want to send them on intelligence missions. So we could say, well why don't we just go straight to the to the back alley right now? And maybe we will. Maybe we'll send a couple of people. But there's a lot of other things long-term we need to think about. So for example, should we go ahead and send people to the uh church cellar to make an escape plan?
Because if we have an escape plan we'll be safe if the cops see us, right? So that's a great idea. Well, the the problem with doing that is you know, it um we need what? Two people, right?
Yep.
Yeah, we have to assign at least two people and it's going to take three times.
Yeah. So, for those of you who are tracking the time thing, check the bottom left corner. That's how much time it's going to take for this to resolve. Uh and then what happens basically this is a game where you actually have to read the cards. Um so, this is a a good example. So, it's got any stipulations at the top in gray. Uh at the bottom left corner there's the amount of time it's going to take to resolve this task. And then this one's automatically successful, but that check is like what you resolve when it's done. Um you might get something, you know, to take this tech training really quick. Again, stipulations in gray. Um you know, the bottom left here is the amount of time it takes and the amount of success you need to get a certain skill. So, you got to send somebody techy here and they have to get one progress in that bag. And then uh up top if they fail um or if they succeed, you get slightly different results.
Yeah. So, I'm just going to make a suggestion to kick us off here, Liz, and let me know what you think. So, I would suggest let's take Corrine and Alice and let's put them up here to the back alley to show people getting some birds.
I fully agree. Let's put Alice on this task over here.
Yep. And we're going to assign Okay, so what Liz is doing before we move on is um Liz is assigning Alice to do the manipulation part of the task. So, the green side of Alice goes to the green side of the task. Corrine is going to do the uh insight portion. So, the blue side goes to blue. And if you look at the back alley, we need one blue success and one green success. Uh one person cannot do multiple different tasks, right? Each person have You can assign multiple people, so we could do this, but then they would both be working on insight. And so, to be successful, we need one to be. So, and then we'll we'll assign to Ton.
Yep.
And now let's My suggestion is let's assign um two of the ladies that we have left to the church cellar. And it doesn't really matter which two except my suggestion is that we then send the last one to the safe house and we'll explain why we want to do that.
Yes.
But the one we send to the safe house, I also think after she's done, we'll want a trainer. So, of these three, who would we want to train?
Okay, let's think about this. Um this is important. I also might like to see somebody trained like I like that Heidi is blue and stealthy because we get troops in the bag, we can send her to the train station a bunch and get the troops out.
Yeah. Yeah, I think either I was thinking either her because she as you say she's stealthy or Marguerite cuz she's the only one besides Alice that has tech.
tech. Oh, gosh.
I like your idea for Heidi. We know that that's important. So, let's just go ahead and get it early.
Yeah, my last couple of games I've been really in trouble trying to get I I can't use the train station cuz like my best blue person would be not stealthy at all and then I just keep putting more troops in the bag.
Yeah.
Life is twice as hard, people.
All right, well, let's do this. Let's assign both ladies Let's assign Marguerite and Danique to the to the church cellar. Now,
Yes.
this before in passing, but I want to mention it again. These two ladies have never met before, okay? One from the the sort of like manipulation focus cell and the other's from the technical cell. So, they they arrive at the church cellar, both having been told by Alice, "Hey, I need you to go to the church cellar and make an escape plan." So, they arrive and then they have this awkward moment of like, "Wait, who are you? Who are you?"
And so, because of this awkwardness and the attention they draw, we have to add an alert token to the bag.
Yeah. Like uh you know, maybe Danique was looking out in the street and she's like, "Oh, are you Marguerite?" And person is like, "No, why are you looking at me and
very awkward.
All right, and then we're going to send Heidi to the safe house. Now, when we Sorry.
we're going to assign three time.
Yeah.
Let's move that back over.
Here you go.
Thank you.
All right, we'll put these Let's set these right off here so we can see them easy. Okay. All right, so now we have done the first part of the turn. The first part of the turn is assign all your the all the agents you have in your hand.
Yep.
The second part of the turn is look at every place you have agents with time and remove one time from them.
Yep.
So, we've now removed this time. This time is not coming back. We put it in the discard pile. And now we resolve every location that has no time on it. And we look at them and there's only one and that's the safe house.
Yes.
So So, the safe house effect is that we get to remove an alert token from the bag. And this is why we went through this process of assigning these two ladies to the to the church seller. We add an alert so we have Heidi laying low taking some heat off of the group. And so now we get to take this alert that we added back out.
Yeah.
is what I earlier when I said mitigation, right? Like you want to be thinking about anytime you're adding troops, adding alert, whatever to the bag, how am I going to get that out if possible.
Yeah, we're trying to keep it clean. The other thing to note about the safe house, um I feel like this is something I just want to make sure we flag, is that plus one in the bottom. What that means is that you're assigning um as it says in the gray part, one time for each additional operative assigned here. So, basically it's always one when you assign someone. If you assign two operatives, it's two time. If you assign three operatives, it's three time. And we did this specifically so that you cannot just spam the bag all the time and remove a bunch of alert too easily. If you If you to remove a lot of alert at once, you're going to have to wait for it and you're going to take a bunch of people off the street. So, figuring out how to balance your need to manage the bag and your need to keep people available is an important trick to the safe house.
It's
[clears throat]
So now Heidi's done with her task, so she comes back to hand.
Yep.
If If there was somebody in jail, we would now do the interrogation step of the game, but there's not, so the the round's over. Uh now new new round starts and the first step is to assign operatives, but one thing I want to pause and talk about real quick is this is probably the single most like kind of getting your mind around the importance of the impact of what just happened. We have five different ladies that went to three different locations. All of the things that they were doing are resolving at a different time.
Yeah.
So now we have only one person in hand to assign. And so there going to be times, especially late in a mission, where you need a bunch of people getting together to do a thing and you got to plan ahead of time to make sure that their things are resolving because you cannot you you can if if you get in a situation where like, well I want to keep Heidi back because I want to send her with somebody to go do a thing. You can keep a person back, but you have to spend the time to do it and then you're starting to waste time, which is you never ever ever want to waste time.
No. The other thing is if there was nowhere to send Heidi cuz you think you have to watch what kinds of places are matches for the skills that your operatives have. So if you don't plan well, you can end up with somebody who feels like an odd one out. And it's like, well where do I send them? And to you know, in order to kind of keep them on retainer, you still have to spend the time even if you don't send them anywhere.
Right.
So
So So now we want to send Heidi to get her trained, so we're going to send her to the country house. Which is two time?
Two time.
So we're going to add two time. Everybody's assigned, so phase one of the turn's done. Now we take a time off of each location and we see that the back alley has no time. So, now we're going to resolve it. So, this is the first time we go through and walk through the um the bag resolution part.
Yes. So, let's recap. We need one progress in blue and one progress in green. So, that means we're going to draw for both Coreen and Alice cuz those are the two operators who are there. And we need to get one success in the blue side from Coreen and we need to get one success in the green side from Alice and we get to choose the order that we're resolving them in and this is also where we're going to talk about why training is important. So, Alice is trained in everything. She's just good at everything. She has a lot of control over what she draws. Coreen on the other hand over here is not trained and so the way that this is reflected in the game is that for Coreen we automatically for this check have to pull two tokens, no more, no less. She doesn't have a lot of She can do the thing, but she doesn't have like the finesse of a person who's fully trained in that thing.
Alice on the other hand is able for any check she is assigned to to draw between zero and three tokens from the bag and we get to choose at the moment of draw. So, there are a lot of reasons that you might draw zero like if you know the check is already messed up and you don't want to make it worse or if somebody's already passed it and you you know, you sent two operators to the same task and she doesn't need to draw, you can stop. Or you know, you might be trying to play your odds and get three. So, we have more control with Alice. So, for this check, I would recommend, tell me if you agree or not, that we draw for Coreen first and see what happens and then we figure out what we want to do with Alice.
Yep, sounds good to me.
So, we're going to see how Coreen does up here. All right. She's been reliable in the past. What will we do? Okay, a perfect check, but we still I to draw one more. It's like I got what I wanted. Uh we're going to get one progress in blue and I'm just going to show that with this piece. But we still have to keep drawing. Okay, so she got just two straight up checks. She killed it, but that also means that these are going to stay out here and there are fewer checks in the bag.
And and this doesn't matter, but technically she would put two tokens there, right? She only needed one. Now and and again, I think this is obvious to people watching, but it's actually bad for us in some ways that she drew this check because that's fewer checks now for Alice to draw when she pulls.
Yes. So um just uh for instructional purposes, I'm I'm showing them a search of the bag. So we we have four x No, there's still five checks in the bag, but a lot of them have a letter attached to them and there are three x's. So our odds are still good. But the most of the checks that remain, there's only one that's just a check. Everything else involves a loss of time or an alert. And so, you know, we can keep being successful here probably. I mean, the odds are, but it also means that it becomes more problematic.
Well, and and and to be clear like people might want to like why wouldn't you just pull three with Alice? Well, one, there's two tokens in the bag that waste time.
Yes.
And there are three tokens in the bag that cause alert. And if we draw too many alert, we're going to add a troop to the bag, right? So there's reasons why you might not want to draw three in this situation.
Yes. I think this is we only one progress. I think we draw two. What do you think?
Yep. I think that's a good.
The David's is special. Just draw one more than you might need. Okay.
Yay.
So we got a check with an alert. And we got another check with an alert. The good news is that we sent two stealthy people on this mission, this little task, so we're going to talk about it. So now let's we got all the progress we needed. So we as you can see, we did a little overkill. We got one manipulation and one insight progress. In fact, we got two of each. So we are good to go on the check. And now we're going to resolve the card, and then we're going to do uh like a little stealth check. So, at the top it says, "Move one pigeon marker from the supply to the untrained area on the pigeon coop." So, that's the first thing. Yay, we got a pigeon, everybody. Uh but, it also says, "Place one alert token in the success bag for each operative assigned here." Which means that if we tried to like overdo it and put extra people here, we would have added even more alert. So, we got the bird, but leaving the back alley with like a little bag that's going and like, you know, moving around or something like that. Like, it's just, you know, you look a little funny when you got a bird tucked into your cardigan, I'm assuming. Um my lizards get about it, but a bird, I don't think it'd be Um but, like, you know, I think uh you just can't help but raise a little bit of attention if you're like acquiring birds in a sketchy back alley. So, um this all got resolved.
We're going to do a stealth check. So, basically, you have to look at your alert after a check. We have two alert. The good news is that we have two stealth. So, if you look in the top right-hand corner, that little cool hat and sunglasses symbol, that means that both of these ladies have stealth. And so, one stealth cancels out one alert. There's two alert, there's two stealth, like nothing nothing bad happens. If we had more alert than we had stealth on the mission, um there would be a troop in the bag, because basically we've attracted the attention of the authorities, and now they might pick one of us up for an arrest. So, that's how you mess up the bag. But, for now we didn't. So, all of these things go back in the bag. Yay.
To include the two alert we just added because we were successful.
I know. It sucks to be the victim of our own successes. Come on. Who designed this?
But, our ladies and the ladies back to our hand.
Yep.
Okay.
And then again, if somebody were in jail, we would resolve that, but there isn't.
Yep.
All right. Now we have So we go to beginning of a new round. Now we have an interesting choice to make. So we could send these two ladies right back to the back alley and get another pigeon. The other uh There's a lot of things we can do. We could go recruit another uh operative if we wanted. We could train Now, there's no reason to train Alice, but we could send Alice to a location to research a piece of equipment. Uh let's talk about that actually a little bit more in a second. We could send Corrine to get trained, but we can't because uh Heidi's already there. Or we could send both of them to the safe house to get those two alert tokens we just added back out. So like we have this all of these options about how we want, you know, to to progress. One thing we should um just kind of quickly cover is the how to make a tool, right?
Yes.
So um there's lots of different tools you can make. They have different pros and cons. One that we might want to just show off is the bomb, right? The reason I say that is because the bomb has two really, really useful um options it can do. One is you can Once you've researched and then built the bomb, you can detonate it to cause a um distraction and get six time. It's the only way in the game you could ever get more time back. And you We've already see we're we're already burned through a ton of our time. So time is at a premium.
Yes.
The other option is it is a dangerous, but effective way to getting people out of prison. So there's if you know, if we have an uh operative imprisoned, we have different ways we can try to get them out, but one of the ways is to literally blow a a into the prison and help them escape. Though, there is a risk that they die. So, the bomb is a great tool to to build. Um if we wanted to build it, the first step would be to send a trained operative to the location. So, we would send like Alice there. We would suc- be if we were successful here, we would take the bomb and we would move it into the workshop.
Yep.
And then subsequently, we would have to take an operative or or multiple operatives to the workshop, research the item. It then moves to the safe house. So, once an item's there, we can use it for whatever, you know, whatever its purpose is. So, I just wanted to quickly cover that.
Yes. Also, this is covered in the um I did a video of the interest scenario that'll be in the show notes, and I did build items in that video. So, if you want to see it done, um uh we have a example from me. Sorry.
No, no, that's good. All right. So, what do we do? I mean, we have
Okay. I think we at least send Kareem to the safe house to keep mitigating the alert.
Uh-huh. I would I mean, I would not actually be opposed to sending Alice to to build
don't think it's a bad idea. It gives us the option to build it. Cuz the thing is that the the blueprint will just sit there from chapter to chapter. Yeah. So, we don't have to like we don't have to build it now. We could just get it.
Yeah, that's that is a really good point. We should quickly note, and I will talk about this in more depth at the end. Um you do mostly you reset things between chapters, but training operatives, recruiting operatives, getting equipment, all of those things uh stay from chapter to chapter. And so, investing in and researching equipment is a really good thing. Okay. So, we assign Kareem, and what we have now is a lot of places are resolving at the same time.
Yay.
We can resolve these in whatever order we want. Sometimes it matters a lot, sometimes it's not a big deal. The biggest impact is that uh if we resolve one of these locations that requires a check, it's possible a troop goes into the bag. So, let's let's say for example, we resolved Corrine first and she caused a troop to go into the bag and then we were resolving somebody else that also checked, that person could then go to jail. So, we have to be very careful about the exact sequence. We're lucky that two of these locations don't require a check at all. So, we can just go ahead and resolve Corrine and pull an alert token out.
Yep. I must be thinking, here we go. Uh so, goodbye to this alert token. Hooray.
And then we can resolve Danique and Marguerite and we get the escape plan and we get to put it here at the safe house.
Yay! So, we have a sick escape plan now. So, we draw two troop tokens easy escape plan, avoid going to jail. Do we put the troop token back in the supply of whole token to place it and this card goes back to the church cellar after that point. So, basically it's not a forever escape plan, it's a for now escape plan and then you have to build another one if you use it.
Yeah. All right. And so, then we just have to resolve for Heidi. So,
Yep.
You You mentioned this before, but to reiterate, she's untrained so she has to pull two tokens. There's no choice here. She has to pull two.
Yeah. So, let's see how let's see how it goes here. One. Okay. Two.
Perfect.
Fortunately, she has stealth.
Yep. Yeah.
So, the one alerts isn't going to kill us here. Uh so, we just get to resolve with success. So, if uh if uh she's untrained, we can flip her card at this location to its trained side.
Yay.
She
All right. Oops. Sorry. Okay. Yes. And now you get it back.
I do want to note uh one thing I really love about the art for this game is that everybody looks cool. So, Heidi was already, you know, she's successful, she's doing her thing, but now she looks like a badass. Like
Getting them trained also them cool. The What are the other side is awesome. I want to again thank Carlos in conjunction with Meeple Foundry for making it so beautiful.
We love our game. It's gorgeous.
Yes, the art really incredible. So appreciated.
Yeah, I mean one thing I mean like hopefully people are kind of seeing this as we're playing it. Um this is what we really tried to do with the game is provide players with an an experience that tells an emergent story. Right now, you get into it as much as you put out right like you get out of as much as you put in. So, if you if you just want to sit here and play a game of like icons and numbers and stuff, that's fine. But there's a lot of elements that we think uh really help tell that emergent story, but one of the most critical pieces is the art. Like if you look at you know, like you just said, just just the simple story of each operative and their sort of untrained and trained helps tell that tell that story, but so do the locations.
Yeah. Okay. So, uh nobody's in jail, thank goodness. We got to assign these people. So, Okay, I want to send at least one person to the safehouse to get the other alert out.
Okay. I think we need to go back and get a bird, right? We need
I was about to say. I think we just I think we rock up here with baby Dominique and our newly trained friend Heidi. And like try to get a bird?
Why don't we send um two two people to the back alley and then do we do we just send two people to Or we can send
No, if we send two though, it'll remove both of the alert that we put in
But we'll have to add an But we'll have to add an alert because they're they're mixing them.
You're right.
So So what we could do is let's pick our two that we're going to send here.
Okay, it has to be unique cuz we have to have somebody with the gift of gab to be like, "Hey, you got any pigeons?"
Yeah. And we might as well send Heidi since she's she's got Siri trained and got stealth, right?
Yeah.
All right. Let's do
almost as good, but she's untrained.
All right, we have to It takes two time and we have to add an alert. But what I'm But what I'm wondering is why don't we send one person to the safe house and then we just leave one back? Because if we send them together, they're just going to take two time and they're going to add a token that they're going to remove anyway. But if we keep a person back, they resolve
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Okay. Yeah, I agree.
All right. Let's let's keep Let's keep this.
You'll note also, everyone, our play through is already coming to a natural end of cuz we're only going to do one chapter and some setup because our time is running short.
Yeah.
Brutal.
Brutal.
Brutal.
All right, so we assign that. Now we remove it.
I got it. I got it, Mr. Fancy.
All right. So again, we might as well resolve Marguerite first because um there's no draw for her.
Yeah, there's only one like uh added in alert in the bag left. Uh I also do want to note, by the way, people, you cannot remove any starting tokens from the bag. So you can only remove alerts that you added. You cannot go to the safe house to remove an alert progress.
Yeah.
Nothing really asked. I just thought about it. Like let me just make sure.
This is the first time Oh, no, they they they don't resolve yet. So we got to just need to resolve Alice, right?
Alice. Yeah. I think we probably just draw to of
Yeah, she only needs one success. I'm cool with that.
okay.
Yeah.
It was okay.
Yay.
Okay, pretty good.
And again, we got an alert, but Alice has stealth, so we don't have to add a troop to the bag.
Yeah. So, one of the things that we deliberately did is that Alice is good at everything, but you'll note that Corrine, like she's stealthy, but she has no secondary ability. Uh meanwhile, Marguerite is not stealthy, but she does have a secondary ability in insight. So, if you need another insight person, you can send her. Uh and that is the difference. So, like stealthy people are great, but they're also very like single-minded.
All right. So, now we successfully researched the bomb with Alice, so we put the bomb over in the workshop. We've just researched it, we've got the blueprints, but we've got to build it still if we want it.
Yeah.
Okay. We have five time left. Do we Do we have enough time to build the bomb and try to use it, or do we want to keep it for the next chapter and do some other other things?
Um ooh. I Okay, I think at least one person needs to go back to the safe house to pull that last alert so that this is the cleanest pull possible.
Okay.
Then, I mean, we're going to run out of time. I kind of feel like we might as well send her to work on the bomb. It's only one time.
Yeah, what why don't we do this? Why don't we send Corrine here?
Yeah, and why don't we send Marguerite to work on the bomb?
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. It's almost like we're of one mind about this game.
So, it's only one time to do the bomb.
Yeah. All right.
Pretty good.
So, we assign, so we remove time, and now all three things are going to resolve at the same time.
Yeah, so let's just do Corrine first. Let's get it all nice and clean in the bag. Ah. Sorry everybody who just got motion sickness from me messing with her screen angle. Search. All right, so we got that last alert out. We're going into the pigeon hunt with a fully clean bag. Let us pray.
and now let's talk about the sequence here. This is important. We have as as Liz said, we have the cleanest bag. It's not going to get any better than this. Now is the time to think about two things. One is which check is most important because we probably want to do it with the bag right now. Slash. We have to think about the implications of if we do add alert, you know, and there's a potential for a troop and all of that. Which do we want to draw first and which do we want to draw second?
So, I'm okay with doing pigeons because I think pigeons is the most mission critical. It's literally the mission.
Mhm.
Also because we have the escape plan. Even if they do add a troop, we can get out of it one time.
Yeah, agreed.
So, I feel like we're pretty we're in good shape.
Yep.
Things have gone relatively well for us here. So, let's go ahead and pull for Janek first since she's the untrained operative who has to pull.
Yeah, actually and Liz, let me interrupt you. One thing we didn't explicitly discuss, when you're pulling for operatives at a location, you pull for everybody at the location from the bag without putting the tokens back in the bag.
Right.
But as soon as you're done with that location and you start a new location, you put everything in the bag and then you reset it for the next place.
Yes.
People probably got that from as we were walking through it, but just to be very clear about that process.
Yeah. Yeah, so basically the idea is that you can kind of actually overextend on here and there's only so much you can do on any check. So, um one thing to make sure that people know is that if people had been available at the right times, Karine actually could be up here with Heidi and they could both be involved in the check. So, you kind of have to think through like, you know, what do I want to How do I want to handle these pulls if I'm pulling for too many people? You know, can I dump the bag and then end up not getting what I wanted even though there were enough people there? That kind of stuff. All right, so Danique. You want to pull this time?
No.
This is your luck.
I'm scared. You pulled Haven't you pulled everything? You keep going. You've been doing well.
Okay.
That's actually good. That's actually good. Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
We have our manipulation.
All right, you got it, Danique. You found the bird.
All right, how many do you want to pull for Heidi?
How many Okay, it's zero to three cuz she's trained.
I mean, you pulled a fail already. Like I I say pull two. Yeah. Yeah, there you go, Heidi.
Oh.
Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
It's not Okay, it's not that bad. It's going to be okay cuz we're smart and we made a scapegoat plan. We thought about this.
So, that's like Make sure people understand why we're saying uh-oh. We have two alert tokens, but they only have one stealth between them, which means we have more alert than stealth. So, we add a troop to the bag.
R- r- r- r- Uh but the good news is that we do get a pigeon.
Yeah.
Uh the further bad news is that the other The other consequence here is we have to place one alert token in the success bag for each operative assigned here and there were two. So, two more alert are going in. So, we're putting the tokens we originally drew back in. So, that's Those are all fine, you know, more or less. But, we also have to add a troop, which can flat up land you in jail and two alert. So, we left this bag a messier than we found it.
And who would have thought you keep going back to the back alley to get birds and you draw the attention of the troops?
I don't know why they care. It's just birds. It's fine. Let me be the pigeon lady from Home Alone 2. How would they know? Like
There's nothing suspicious here. Um Actually, one of the things I really enjoyed about doing the pigeon research for this mission, we could talk about it at chapter reset, was like you know you know how you always think about maybe the pigeons go both ways and then realizing that no, like physically they have one home and that's the home they go to and then you have to like act accordingly. So, in order to have messenger pigeons that go out, you literally have to have like a person carry that pigeon to destination, get the message and then they let the pigeon go and it flies back. Just craziness.
All right. Um so
Just resolving. Yeah. So, we have to pull for Marguerite. She's untrained, so we have to pull two. Now, we're trying to get three successes. One thing we haven't talked about is if you're working on some tasks, most tasks, if you get some successes, but not all of them, you can leave the successes you've had behind and then come back and finish it. There are some locations, like if you go back and look at the back alley, if you fail there, you remove all progress. So, you don't get to keep that progress over time. But the bomb is not that, right? So, that even though we need three, even if we don't complete it this time, we could always send people back to finish it later.
Right. I also want to point out something, which is that you know, um at best, it takes you three time to build the bomb and you get six time back. So, I think that, you know, people who are wondering like what's the value proposition here, the point is that you build the bomb early and then you hang on to it until you need it in a later chapter. Or you build it in a desperate attempt to get people out of jail. So, like what's happening here is that we're in this kind of training first chapter where we're trying to prepare for the future and the bomb is part of that preparation. So, we wouldn't blow it up to get six time now. We're going to blow it up to get six time in like chapter three when we're desperate to get a pigeon back.
Yep. All right.
All right. I think you have to pull this time.
Oh, it's all right. I'll pull two for Margaret. Two for Margaret. One one success.
Okay. Okay.
One success and alert. Now, is it we have I mean we we don't even have to pull for Alice. Like it sounds odd. Like sometimes you think about it like Alice can pull between zero and three. Like zero. There are many times in the game where you will send a trained operative to a location to basically serve as backup and have that flexibility to pull zero. Pulling zero is sometimes is is the best choice.
Yeah. Discretion is the better part of valor and all that.
Yeah. In this case the the the chapter's almost going to end. Uh it would be really good if we go ahead and get the bomb built. So, I think we pull max three and see what happens.
I think we pull three. I think we pull three.
All right. One two three. All right. So, we are going to we are going to add another cop to the bag because we pulled two alert and we only have one stealth.
Yep.
bag is really rough, but we're about to again switch to the end of the chapter or part of the of the mission. So,
Yeah. So, this game also has some natural heat up and cool down cycles that you can use and abuse to get further along. Uh I also just want you to know this has been a very good run for David and me, but we've also had uh situations where we would end in this chapter with no birds.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
it just
Sure. I mean it really part we've we've played it very safe. We've only got two birds. If you want to come out of this chapter with like three or maybe even four birds, it's possible. You can pull it off, but you're going to be really risking going to jail. You're not going to be training operatives. You're not going to be building the bomb. Right? So, it's a big trade-off.
So, this bomb nut comes up to the safe house where we have acquired it for future use. Yay! So, we have a scape plan and a bomb. We got like a little hoard of things over for some birds. Hanging out in the safe house is a great time now.
So, so we could um we've got three time left. I propose that we do something create well we have to be careful. We have to be careful because we've got the cops in the back and it
I know escape. Well, we do have an escape plan.
We have an escape plan, but there's two cops in the bag. What I was going to propose is we send everybody to the back alley and get one more bird. But, if we do that, what's going to happen is we're going to have to pull a bunch of tokens. We would probably wind up pulling the cop.
Yeah.
We would end with somebody in jail and if somebody ends the the this part in jail, it's bad. We don't want that to happen.
Well, it's not that bad as long as they're not Alice.
Yeah, we would wind up probably losing a the spare token, right? That would be the worst.
I think it's fine. Let's be a little sad. It's fine. They knew what they they knew their job.
All right, let's walk through it. So, what we have to One requirement is that everybody has to be on a skill that they are trained with and we're fortunate that everybody has either blue or green.
Yes.
We're going to put Margarita on blue. We're going to put Heidi on blue. And we're going to put Karina on blue because all of them only have blue.
Yep, and we'll put Alice and Heidi on green. I mean Janine, sorry.
All right. Now, we only have one time left and one other thing to keep in mind is that there are two different sick uh tokens in this bag that causes to lose time immediately.
Yep.
If we were to run out of time before we finish this mission by drawing both of those, we it we end it and we failed uh the um
Yeah, it's just done.
the effort, right? Okay. So, we would technically what would happen is we would remove a time and then we would start a whole new round, but there's nobody to assign, so we remove a time. And now we resolve.
resolve. Okay. So, the real problem here is that we have two untrained operators on this side.
Yeah.
So, I think we just pulled the left side first. We're just going to pull for Corrine and Denique and then remember pulling zero, Heidi should not have to pull anything. If we even make it through this.
Yep. So, you want to pull for and it's important that we declare who we're pulling for because they could go to jail. So, who do you want to pull for?
Let's pull for Corrine.
All right. Okay.
Okay. Not too bad.
One success. All right, Margarite. Okay. That's fine.
Okay.
Now, we do not want to pull for Heidi because we got our success, so we need it for insight.
She doesn't need to do anything else.
All right.
Now, we're going to pull for for Denique.
This could be really Okay.
OH.
All right.
I shouldn't have pulled that second one. I was supposed to pull one at a time, so we're just going
That's okay. So, we we get the cop. We're going to use the escape plan.
Are we doing it? Yeah, I guess it cuz I would not At this point, we can't pull for Alice, but that's okay cuz we're going to pull through. So,
So, we use the escape plan. We discard the cop and we repull that token.
And then we have to pull one more. So, okay, this is the check with we lose our time.
All right, so let's Let's Don't pull it yet. Let's walk through all the possibilities here.
Oh.
If we pull the other cop, Denique goes to jail and we've lost this. Everybody goes back. You If you pull a cop in the middle of a mission resolution like this,
Yeah, everybody scatters.
You fail it.
You don't have to resolve the fail text, but it just You just scatter.
You just stop. If we pull the fail time token, we've run out of time and we've also not accomplished it.
Yeah.
Anything else, we're good to go.
Yay!
I was like uh uh uh uh uh. Okay, so we get another burn.
Yeah.
Yay! Caca, that's how we got that, but
All the ladies come back. And for everybody watching at home, uh things ain't going to go this well for you, probably. This was a We That All the All the stars aligned.
How many times have we played this and it didn't go that way?
Cuz all There's a second troop for that bag, so somebody could have got a jail. Um
Yeah. Yeah.
But um so, the good news is that we got our pigeon. The other thing is that okay, so technically we would add five alert to the bag. Uh I do want to note something, which is that you somehow If you have to If you add all of your alert to the bag, or if you add all of your troops to bag and you would have to add one more, uh you will lose because you uh didn't uh take good care of of your of your network. So, just so you know, this is limited and you don't want to need it and not have it. The good news is I'm not I'm not even going to bother to put this in the bag because we're going to do uh end of chapter resolution. We have no time. This chapter is over, and so we're going to do a new chapter. Um and so, uh the way this works is that you get a nice relieving cool off in the bag. So, all of the alert that's in the bag will come out.
Yay! I think there's a couple Yeah, there's a lot of alert here. Oh my god. Um any of the troops that are in the bag are going to come out, although we're going to add them back in in a second, you'll see. You go back to your starting bag. Very nice, very clean, very respectful. Um and then, you are going to, if it's the second chapter, add one troop to the bag. If it's the third chapter, you add two. So, like, you're advancing, you're drawing some attention. So, we are going to start this next chapter with one troop in the success bag. And you have to account for that in your mind. We're going to bring down any new locations that are for chapter two of our scenario. So, in this case, as you can see, we have pigeon location that says select chapters two and three.
So, we have the abandoned building and the forest. And so, these are two different locations where you are able to train your pigeons. So, when people train these like homing pigeons, they take them to locations away from their house and let them fly back. That's literally what you do to train pigeons. And so, you are training the pigeons by teaching them to come back to you. And you have to put some effort into that to make a good homing pigeon. And then, in chapter three, we'll get locations that are you're taking them to places where you can gather information. And if the pigeon comes back, then you uh then you get some scoring stuff. So, you know, you can get intel from the neighboring town, you could send them out of the post office, or you could take them on the train. So, basically, it's um it's you're going through the full arc of acquiring, training, and then using the pigeons for intelligence.
Um So, for chapter two, we'd have our new locations. If anybody was in the jail, they would come back. But, if anybody had been in despair, those tokens would leave the game. Um so, we might want to talk about the jail real quick just cuz we we were really clean this game.
Yeah.
Um but, that's basically the way the chapter setup works. You get a cool down in between. The things that are in the workshop, you can still build next turn. So, you don't like next chapter, so you don't have to get rid of those. And the things safe house you get to keep. And so, like, those are the things that you keep in addition anybody you've recruited from chapter to chapter. But, you get like a breather. Uh and that is on purpose that you can't death-spiral your way into a loss. Um, but let's talk about jail. So, let's say for demonstrating for for just for demonstration only, let's say that poor Marguerite had to go to jail. She's in the jail. The moment somebody goes to jail, you put an interrogation token out in the jail.
Yeah, and importantly importantly not on the operative, on the jail itself.
Yes, because all the operatives are going to get interrogated according to the number of interrogation tokens. So, that step at the end of every turn where we're like, "Okay, there's no one in jail, we don't have to do it. Okay, there's no one in jail, we don't have to do it." Well, if there's somebody in jail, you do have to do it.
Um, and the way that this works is that if there's an interrogation token on the jail, you get to the point of the turn where it's time to interrogate. It's poor Marguerite's in here, we're going to pull token for her, and if it has a check on it, she stays strong. If there is an X on there or there's no check on it, um, she's going to acquire a despair. So, this time she would have been okay, but for demonstrative purposes, let's just say that we pulled out this X. If that happens, she gets a despair token on her. If she ends up with three despair tokens on her, she leaves the game with all of the tokens. So, this is also a limited resource. If you run out of despair, it means that you just succumbed to the sadness of your moment in history. Um, but if she gets three of these, she leaves the game entirely, and she betrays someone she knows, which means that you can either desperately try to recruit somebody in the same cell for her to betray, or she's going to betray Alice and put Alice in jail. If you ever end a chapter with Alice in jail, you do lose because you need her.
Um, so basically the that this jail becomes a really quick brutal thing where you're spending time trying to cope. Because, you know, if she gets interrogated at the end of the turn, guess what happens? There's another interrogation. So, we're going to pull two of those at the end of the next round. For everybody who's in the jail. Um and so, the jail just ramps up the pressure really, really aggressively on these people. So, we gave you ways to mitigate it, so you can send people to talk to the guards of the jail and they can remove an interrogation token for that, based on how successful you are. Or you can smuggle things in. If you're successful with that, it's like you remove despair cuz they feel hope from the outside. But these things take time, and as you know, you're doing back checks for them, so you don't know if you're going to be successful with this or not. You can also try to orchestrate a jailbreak. So, if you come here, um you can get a jail key.
Um you could like So, basically, you could build a jail key and then you can come here and use it. Um but the other way to get out is the bomb, which risks but it's it's a jail. But basically, once people start getting arrested, it becomes this just mess of dealing with it. And we put this in the game because a lot of the people who were working in sort of spycraft at this time were very concerned with breaking their compatriots and prisoners of war out of jail. Um it was a common thing. Um there were people who were famous for being really great jailbreakers. And uh you know, we wanted to honor that by showing like how messy it is to have people who know things about your network in the hands of the enemy. And a very not civilized enemy. Any thoughts, David?
No, I think that I mean, the only thing I would say, and this is probably pretty obvious to people, is there's there's essentially like, I guess, broadly speaking, two approaches to how you deal with the jail. One way is what Liz and I did, where we preemptively went and got the the escape plan and use You all saw that if if it had not been for the escape plan, somebody would have gone to jail. So, you can kind of spend the time and and effort up front to try to limit the the impact of the jail. The other approach is just say, "You know what? I'm willing to take my chances. We're not going to spend the time and in the upfront investment. And if somebody goes to jail, we'll either deal with it as best we can or we let them break, you know, and you like you said, you you can recruit somebody or you can let Alice go and break her out or whatever. Um there's not a right or wrong, but there depending on how where you are in the in the chapter, hav- having people go to jail as you said can spiral quickly. So, you have to be careful.
It's a calculated risk.
Yes. And also, if you're desperate towards the end of a mission, you just got to get something done. It's like, "Well, the other thing Oh, one thing I do think we should mention about the jail is we talked about what happens if you draw some this doesn't have a check on it. If you draw a troop from the bag, the person who's in jail dies.
Right.
Just immediately. So, they don't rat you out, but they also did get killed during interrogation. It's like a thematically heavier aspect of the game. Um it does lead to a little bit of a cool off, but it's also really bad. Um there have been times where I felt really guilty because I just hoped that I'd pull a troop rather than it have somebody break us out of Alice's jail. And I kind of feel like that's where the game's emergent narrative is really heading in the dark direction where I think people were probably really headed. So, this is a World War I researched game, but uh if you want to kind of see what I think this must have felt like I think Army of Shadows is like probably the best movie about this kind of despair and stress. And it's like a French Resistance in World War II film. But, um you know, the art's cute, bright colors.
Um you know, but you can slowly spiral down into where things are really messed up and I that's something I like about what we did.
Yep. One final note that I had thought of when we were talking through this. People might wonder we talked about why the the operatives are colored the way they are, right? They're sync they're color coded to their primary skill that they're associated with. The locations are similarly color coded. If if a place is red, it means that the primary skill associated with resolving it is technical. If it's blue, it's side. If it's green, manipulation. Places that are yellow means that they are tied they're they're equal the skills that are of equal importance.
Yes.
Uh and if they are black, it means you don't have to resolve a skill there.
Yep.
So, I just wanted to mention that people might be curious like why are they colored the way they are? That's why.
Yeah. Awesome. So, that was chapter one of uh News in the Wing, the pigeon scenario from from Queen of Spies. Uh if you're still here with us, thank you so much for giving it a watch. Um David, I'm This is fun, too, cuz I kind of like looking back over something we made in the past. It makes me feel really like happy to see.
Yeah, it's fun to revisit it. Totally. Yep, absolutely.
Um Oh, one more thing we would have done, by the way, is there would be more time for the reset. Just so y'all know, that you get you get more time for each chapter. So, by the end you have all the time in play. But uh yes, if y'all are Gen Con, uh this is going to be at the Salt & Pepper booth. It will also be at Essen. Uh and I think it'll just be more widely available in their online store and stuff after Gen Con. So, uh if you Hopefully this game Hopefully this video helped you get a sense of the game. Um if it's for you, it is gettable as of the airing of this video. Uh and it's really fun to finally get something to print together. Yay!
Um As usual, David, thank you very much. Uh David and I are about to go work on a different game design, so we're busy. Um but uh please like, subscribe, comment, uh Uh and most of all, happy gaming, everybody.