Queen of Spies Mission Conclusion & Impressions | Solitaire (Solo) Espionage Board Game | Episode 2
Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Zella Blitz and welcome back to our continued playthrough of Queen of Spies from Salt and Pepper Games and designed by Liz Davidson and David Thompson. In a previous episode, Alice built plans for a radio Gideon leveled up his inside skill. However, the German forces are aware of our activity and danger lurks. Can we successfully infiltrate the chateau or will our mission go sideways? Let's jump in and find out. A quick recap of where we left off. Uh Pepin had gone to his manipulation training but failed. So he's right back where he started from. Just burned up a little bit of time on us. Gideon did level up, but he was a little bit noisy and noticeable in his training. So that ended up that the German troops are now on us. We have a German troop icon token in the success bag. If we pick that out on a subsequent mission, whatever spy that falls on goes immediately to prison, which is bad. So leveling up was good, but drawing that much attention to yourself was bad. Alice was a star. She developed plans to the radio, which now as we take a look at the workshop. The plans for the radio are there. We can send spies to the workshop to build the radio, which is going to be one of our next actions. And lastly, Margaret and Bernardet, our last two spies, have been working diligently in the church cellar to develop an escape plan. Should one of our spies get arrested, we would immediat immediately be able to get them to avoid prison. So, that should complete soon, which means now we've gone through the last round. It is time for us to start a new round. At the start of every round, we assign spies, which means we need to find homes for Alice, Gideon, and Pepin. And I have
just the thing that I think we're going to do. We are going to take both Gideon and Alice and send them to the workshop. And we are going to assign both Gideon, Alice, Gideon, who has one level one technology skill, and Alice who has level two technology to building the radio. And when you do this in the workshop, you use this success criteria. So, we need two success tokens on uh to pull out of the bag as we conduct this task. And we also have two time tokens to uh attribute to this task. So, we're going to put the two time tokens on the workshop. And Gideon and Alice are going to start building the radio. This is excellent because again, if we can build this radio, we can instantly uncover all the information we need to gain access to the chateau, which is the final destination we're trying to get to. So, this is a good step forward. Margaret and Bernardet, of course, are going to stay in the church cellar. The question is now, what do we do with Pepin, we're going to send Pepin to the safe house.
The safe house is a location that uh for each spy you put in, you add a time token. And this protects any any spy that happens to be in the safe house can't get sent to jail. And it's going to take us one time token token for each spy. And what happens is when we complete this, we remove one alert token from the success bag for each operative assigned here. No skill checks are necessary, which is good because Pepin did not do a very good job on his uh training here. So, I have not had a lot of confidence in Pepin. We're going to give him a really simple task, which is basically just hang low and reduce the level of alert that the German troops have for us in the area. So, Pepin's on the safe house. Oh, one last thing. I mentioned in the previous episode that when spies from different cells work together, we have to add an alert token to the success bag. However, Alice, any job that Alice, any location that Alice is working at with other spies, that doesn't happen because Alex, they all work through Alice. So, there's no problems with different spies working together at the same location. We don't have our alert level increased when that happens. So, with that being said, all of our spies have been assigned to locations. We now go to the second stage in the turn, which is we're going to remove time. So, we will remove that time and discard it over here. Let's go up to see how Pepin's doing. We're going to remove the time for Pepin here at the safe house. So, he's completed his task here. And we can now remove one alert token from the success bag. Pepin is done. So, he's going to go back to the supply. We can assign him next turn. I'm
going to dig into the alert bag and pull out that pesky alert token that caused so much pro problems for us in the last episode. That's the one I'm taking out. We're going to send that back to the general supply. So that's a good step forward for us here. So Margaret and Bernardet, we remove the last time token from their task. They have completed their task here at the church seller, which is to make the safe uh the escape plan, move the escape plan to the safe house. No skill check is required to complete this task. So they are done. We're going to send them back to the the general supply, the general headquarters here, and they're going to get a task in the next turn. We're going to move our escape plan. So we move the the we move the escape plan to the safe house. We can use this whenever German forces arrest one of our agents. We can immediately have that not happen, which is good. So that gives one level of safety for us. Good job, Bernardet and Margaret. And with that, we have completed the removal of time and we've resolved the assignments for all of our spies. Now we go to the step four of this the game flow, which is to resolve interrogations. But nobody's in jail. So we're going back up to the next part where we're going to assign our operatives. So, as we're thinking about placing operatives in uh one more time passage here, we are going to resolve whether we can build the radio. And if we do build the radio, we can send our spies to the chateau because we're going to know all the information we need to get into the chateau. So, with that in mind, I do not want to I do not want to tie up any of these operatives on tasks that are going to take longer than one turn. And I don't want to put Bernardet
and Margaret on a task where we could draw more attention to our spy cell and potentially have another troop token in the success bag. So with that in mind, we're going to have Pepin, Margaret, and Bernardet. They're just going to hang out here at the spy headquarters. Now, when you do that, if you choose not to assign a spy to a task, it does cost one time token for each spy that you do that. So, we're going to take these three time tokens. We're going to discard them immediately. Pepin, Margaret, and Bernardet are just waiting for Gideon and Alice to complete the radio plans. Now, you might be saying, couldn't we just add them to the workshop and speed things up? You can't add spies to an already ongoing task or location. So, we have to leave this task up to Gideon and Alice to finish. And with that in mind, everybody's assigned.
Let's go see uh let's go remove the passage of time. Now, Gideon and Alice, we can remove the passage of time here. And this is a big one because we want to see if we can build the radio. So, we're going to see if we can complete this task. Now, we're up to the step three in this round, which is task completion. Now, if you recall, Gideon is a level one tech level spy, which means that when we draw success tokens for him, we draw two. Um, Alice can draw zero to three. So, what we're going to do first, because we need two, we're going to have Gideon go first. We're going to draw two success tokens, see where we stand, and then we're going to decide what Alice does. With that in mind, let's draw our first success token for Gideon. He gets a success, but he also increases the alert level. This is not good.
Gideon is just a really noisy spy. Let's pick another one here. Now, if we got success, that would actually be pretty good. Oh, that's excellent. Okay. So, um, we have Gideon's picked two tokens, both of which were successful, means we have enough tokens now to build the radio. So, when it becomes to Alice's turn to act, we can go zero to three. We're going to do zero. That's perfect. So, Alice doesn't have to do anything, Gideon actually has performed pretty admirably here. And the nice thing about Alice not having to pick any tokens is that our alert level is one. Our spy level uh stealth level is one. one is equal to one which means we don't add another troop to the success bag. This is very very good. So uh with that in mind we've completed the radio and we can use this immediately. And if we read the text here on the radio says you may not use the radio if spies are assigned to the cafe or local roads and we don't have anybody there. When we use it which is going to be right now flip the cafe and the local roads and then discard this car card. Here are the local roads.
We can flip this. So, we now have gained access to the chateau by listening into German actions on the radio. And we can flip the cafe. We will flip the cafe. Now, we are going to discard the radio. We've used it for its intended purpose. We can send Alice and Gideon back to the general supply. All of our spies are waiting for new assignments. We'll put these back in the success bag. So, we can either decide now in our next round. So, we're we're actually done with that round. We resolved our actions. Then we go to the interrogation round. We don't have any operatives in prison. We've been very fortunate so far on this. So now it is time for us to go to the next round, which is to assign operatives. And we can now break into the chateau or go to one of the events at the chateau and decide to sweet talk the Germans to see if we can get the information that way. We are approaching the final stage of this introductory mission. Now we can Pepin is are Pepin and Alice are only two stealthy spies. If things go sideways here, I definitely want to have Pepin here because he's going to be stealthier, which is going to make it more likely we're not going to draw the German attention to what we're doing.
So, I want to include Pepin in the task. However, he can't break in because he doesn't have the uh uh technology or the insight skill. He's only good at the manipulation skill. So, with that in mind, we're gonna sweet talk. We're going to go to an event. We're going to try to sweet talk the Germans, look around, see what we can find out, and see if we can complete our mission that way. So, let's set up our operatives for this task. Here is our plan. Margaret and Gideon, our team insight. They're going to be walking around the chateau, looking for clues, observing things, and trying to find the information on the dissident that we need. Meanwhile, Pepin and Alice are going to be sweet talking the Germans that are at the event. We're going to bring them in for the manipulation skills. And when you have two levels, this task, a double task here, you put the uh insight team, the left side on the left side here, and the manipulation team on the right side. So Alice and Pepin are for manipulation.
Margaret and Gideon are for the insight and this is a one-time token task because it's just a very quick party event. Now Bernardet, we are going to leave Bernardet out. She's not coming. So we have to burn a time token for her. But it is time for us now to resolve to move time forward which is to move this time forward. And now we can go to our final event. Margaret and Gideon, Pepin and Alice. Now because Alice is here, we don't have to add an alert token to the bag because she's working with everybody. So she's they're all working through her. So team Alice is here and we are ready to go. This is going to be our plan. We have to complete one side of the task before we address the other side. We are probably going to the troops are probably going to show up, but we have the escape plan which allows us to circumvent this problem at the moment. With that in mind, we're going to have Margaret start out. She's going to do insight, and we're looking for two successes on insight. Now, failure here would be bad. It would be place two tokens, two troop tokens in the success bag and remove all progress markers. We need to succeed here. So, we are going to have Margarite draw two tokens.
Hopefully, she'll do as well as Gideon did and get two successes. We get Oh, success, but it's an alert level. That's okay. And aha, there it is. The troops So, the troops are coming to arrest Margaret. However, because of the good work of Margarite and Bernardet, we can drop the escape plan on this attempt by the police. And let's see what this says. When used, if you draw a troop token, you may use the escape plan to avoid going to jail. It cannot be used for interrogation, which is not where we are. Place the pulled troop token in the supply and pull another token to replace it. Then replace this card in the church seller. So the tur the troop token goes back into the supply. We've successfully avoided this attempt. Margaret sneaks back into the event and she gets to pull another token. We have used our escape plan excellently to avoid this catastrophe. However, we still need more successes here. Hopefully, Margaret can get us a success.
She does. Alert level is two, however. But but that's okay. The alert level this time, we can take it. She gets two successes, which is exactly what we needed. We have got enough observed enough information to complete our task. The remaining question is whether Pepin and Alice can now sweet talk the Germans to get the rest of the information that we need. We have drawn pretty well here. We leave these tokens, however, out of the event. So, uh, we can only use the ones that are coming up. We're going to use the same strategy. So, Gideon isn't going to do anything because he can draw zero to three. We don't need him to do anything. He's just hanging out here. Pepin is going to draw two manipulation tokens here. Let's see how he can do. Can he sweet talk? He totally failed before at the country manor. Let's hopefully he's up for the task here. Oh, that's bad. So, it costs us time and it's a failure. Come on, Pepin. Get your act together here. We need some successes. Okay, Pepin goes, "Oh, success. It does cost us time, which is excellent." So, we do have success. It does cost us time. Let's get that first success marker down here. The question is now, how many tokens do we want Alice to pick? However, there's no real downside now to having more alert tokens than that, cuz that would just add an alert token at the mission. It wouldn't compromise the quality or success of this mission. We are in pretty good shape now. So, we want to definitely make sure that Alice here can complete the mission and accomplish the task. So, with that in mind, we're going to have Alice pick all three because it it can't really hurt us here. Um, we want to
maximize the chance we're going to get one more success. Oo, that's a failure. That doesn't help us. Come on, Alice. Hopefully, there's enough in here. Let's go, Alice. She gets a success. Excellent. So, we have two. We have completed our mission. Now, we do have to pick one more, though. But there's nothing really dangerous in here. We've managed to come through this pretty well. We get another success. So, we get extra success here, which doesn't really matter. Alice and Pepin have successfully sweet talked the Germans. Margaret and Gideon have found the information that we need. We have completed two tokens here, two tokens here. Our alert level is two actually, which isn't that bad. We have two spies over here, two disgu um stealth level, so we don't even add an alert level to it. And our success token here is victory. Team Alice have successfully completed the chatau infiltration mission. One of the things I wanted to show quickly is what would have happened had one of our spies been apprehended by the troops. When that happens, you bring them here to just drop them off to the side of the jail somewhere and you put if there are no interrogation tokens on the jail, you drop one here. Then when you come to the resolve interrogation phase, you do a simple action. You pick one for each interrogation chair, each interrogation token up to the three that are in the game on the currently on the jail. You draw one token for each spy.
So if there were one like this, we would draw a token for Margaret. If it's a success of any sort, Margaret withers the uh withstands the interrogation. If it is a failure of any sort, then Margaret has cracked a little bit under the interrogation and we put a despair marker on her. Now, the interrogations intensify. In the next round, there's going to be an extra one added here. So, Margaret would have to pull two tokens. And if she gets to three despair tokens, which is the maximum, what happens is she's removed from the game. All of the despair tokens are taken off of her, but she has cracked and betrayed someone else in our spy network. She betrays either a spy from the same cell or Alice. And if you don't have a spy from the same cell, you have to betray Alice, which means that's really bad. So, you want to try to get operatives out of jail if you can. And there are some ways you can do this. You can have a jail breakout action here. Um, you can uh smuggle in uh some items to the prisoners to help them increase their morale, which removes a despair marker, or you can come in here and try to talk to the guards, which would remove an interrogation marker to make the interrogation less intensive. So, there are some ways to do these. You need keys for the break-in, however, down here.
So, there are it gets to be problematic the more time the more uh spies you have in jail, of course. And so, that that's roughly what happens. Now, if you draw a troop token from the success bag under interrogation, the prisoner immediately dies, which is sad. Uh, but this is roughly how the prison mechanic works. Now, in the introductory scenario, it's fairly straightforward and we had the escape plan and things worked out well enough for the introductory scenario. That's not hard. The other regular missions are much harder than this one. So, you will have spies sent to prison. The introductory chat infiltration mission is really almost like a tutorial to get you involved in the game. But more to the point in our Chateau infiltration mission, happy days for us. Alice and her team have successfully completed their mission and they are ready to go on to the main story which uh again the main story missions have three chapters to them and you can score points depending on how well you do. The introductory mission here just has a success or failure criteria and we were fortunate enough to succeed in this one.
Some random thoughts now on the game. I've played about 3 four hours now. Played the introductory mission a few times. uh started on one of the regular missions uh and spent some time learning the game and and working through and understanding how the game goes. Um I really like this system. It's such a clever world, if you would, for executing tasks and with your mind's eye, you can see the stories that are unfolding and things go sideways as you get into the harder missions. They things really go sideways. The drama and the tension just ratchets up in the regular missions. And I could see this system in and of itself. One of the things immediately goes to my mind is it'd be really easy to make decks of cards once you've got the tokens here to add on missions and other themes to the game that could use this same type of thing where you need items and you've got locations and tasks to accomplish things. It's perfect for espionage. Really like the artwork in the game as well. U the all the mechanics just seem to go together nice.
And yes, you know, there is an element of luck here. you're going to have, you know, missions where things are just going to go sideways because you pull the wrong tokens out of the bag at just the wrong time. So, you you do have to give yourself a little bit of um leniency here that you're not always going to succeed with these missions because stuff happens. But having said that, there are always answers for the things that go bad. Like in this mission here, in the introductory mission, making that escape plan saved everything because it allowed us to continue on with our mission at the chateau. Had we not had that escape plan, we would have failed. Someone would have been off in prison, we've got all kinds of problems. So, the escape plan helped us a lot there. If you get people in prison, then you can try to break them out. You can send people to the train station to watch troops to get more troops out of to get troops out of that success bag.
So, you've got this whole little mini world of mechanics and triggers and levers that you can pull and and press and manipulate to aim towards success in your mission. And I just really really like the artwork here. I think it's so clever. So, yeah, I can envision, you know, packs of cards. Once you've got all the tokens, all you really need is packs of cards. I mean, it' be I'm tempted. I kind I almost want to design a mission on my own and see what kind of a mission I could come up with based on the tools that are given here. you know, make some custom locations, maybe add a couple custom spies and a couple of custom items. I think it would be uh fun to to mod this game as well. I could just see so much potential for this in the future and I really have enjoyed my time with it. This uh very novel, clever, and creative mechanics and just everything flows together nicely. So, I'm I've really enjoyed my time with this this one. And again, this game is coming to uh Gamefound in early December. I'll put a link to the game frown campaign down below if you'd like to check it out. Thanks so much for watching everybody.