Disclaimer: Spy Wars was provided for free by Gregory Love, you can grab a copy as well from the Board Game Geek page. The thoughts and words on this page are my own. Enjoy!
Spy Wars is a two-player print-and-play game from a Western Australian indie developer. So there are no over-the-top Kickstarter or even regular components for you to play with. Everything can be downloaded, printed, cut and organised, ready for your first play.
Being an indie developer, there’s no production team or board game veterans behind Spy Wars. Just one guy over in Perth pouring his passion into a print-and-play.
How awesome is that? Man, I love board games.
Putting my awe aside, I’m setting expectations early here because Spy Wars is not the type of game I regularly review. It’s scrappy and rough around the edges but has some good ideas worth exploring.
Plus, with some more polish and elbow grease, I think this one could be great.
Overview
Spy Wars takes place at the height of the Cold War. Suspicions are on the rise and the US and the USSR are trying to gather intel and carry out missions to prevent a World War threequel.
This global protection starts with you determining the first player for the round through an initiative deck. Afterwards, you take turns placing Agent tokens face down on different Country Cards.
Now, of your eight Agents, four are Decoys, useless for anything more than bringing you a martini (shaken, not stirred). However, they allow you to deceive your opponent since your other four Agents are the actual Spies.
Spies placed on enemy Country Cards give you intel at the end of this Initial Phase, as long as there isn’t an enemy Spy in the same country. Additionally, they will let you carry out Missions, Infiltrate the country’s Government, and Bribe local officials in the Action Phase.
Placing Spies on friendly Country Cards is the defensive option.
By correctly guessing where your opponent’s Spies are, and placing your Spies there as well, you can stop them from gaining intel and make it harder for them to complete Missions. The sole way of getting victory points.
Once all Agents are placed, flip them all face-up and gain your intel. You’ll now take turns using these Spies on different actions. Including:
- Moving your Spy to another Country Card.
- Infiltrating a country and adding an Influence cube.
- Bribe the local officials and obtain more intel based on your Influence with that country.
- Build a Spy Ring (or move an existing one).
- Lastly, you can spend your gathered intel to undertake Missions.
In carrying out a Mission, you first check whether your Spy is a Double Agent. Then your enemy attempts to spot you by rolling dice and performing a detection check.
If your Spy can slip in undetected, you roll a handful of dice to determine the Mission’s success. Otherwise, your opponent gets to challenge your Mission by also rolling dice and playing Ops cards.
Upon a successful Mission, you gain points for its difficulty, a point if it was part of the Space Race, and several points if the country where it took place had an active secret.
After both players take all their turns, check to see if someone has ten points. If so, they’ve won the Cold War! Otherwise, reset the round and continue playing.
Kill your darlings
I’ve played enough board games to know that each one starts with the seed of a great idea. A mechanic, or gimmick, that’s fun and sets it apart from others in the market.
For Spy Wars, that’s the intel phase.
Placing down your Spies and Decoys taps into the covert thrill of two masterminds pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Between the banter of my wife and I, and the bluffing happening on the board, it felt like a scene from your favourite spy novel.
However, an idea seed doesn’t just turn into a great board game. You need to support the seed with water, or additional mechanics, to let it germinate. It’s here where a lot of designers, and Spy Wars, get into trouble.
“Kill your darlings,” is a saying within the design discipline. It means, that sometimes you get so attached to an element of a game that you can’t see how it negatively affects the end product. Designer Gregory Love doesn’t just need to kill his darlings, he needs to take out the whole harem.
Starting with the Skill Cards.
At the start of each game, you randomly assign three Skill Cards to each of your four Spies. These are dreadfully important, as only Spies who share skills with your Mission Cards can execute that Mission.
In theory, this mechanic works. It adds variability to the game and makes sense with the theme – not every Spy is suited for every Mission.
In practice, it was painful. Because, unless you have Nick Mohammad’s memory, you’ll spend so much of the game cross-referencing skills on Missions with skills on Spies. With so much other information you need to retain, remembering which Spies had what skills was impossible.
Missions also overload you with information. Detection checks, opposed Missions and unopposed Missions all have unique resolutions with their own minutiae. Resulting in my nose spending far too much time in the rulebook.
But putting the practicality of Missions aside, they also (annoyingly) don’t make thematic sense.
Due to how they resolve, I found it significantly easier to complete a Mission if it was detected and opposed, rather than if it went unopposed. By the end of my plays, I was hoping for my Spies to be detected so I could score some points on the board.
Imagine if MI6’s new Modus Operandi was for agents to get detected by the enemy before carrying out a mission. It made no sense.
Getting into the weeds
When my Spies weren’t detected, I found completing Missions frustratingly difficult. But you could ease this frustration by pre-planning for the Mission. Using the Influence action to soften the country’s local authorities, or placing a Spy Ring.
I wanted more of this in Spy Wars.
Setting up a country for a Mission and successfully carrying it out felt great, as you get rewarded for all the work you’ve put in.
However, setting up a Country is too slow to make it worthwhile. By the time you’ve placed enough Influence to feel comfortable, your opponent has likely completed several smaller Missions. Picking up a lot of secrets as they do.
These secrets randomly give you one to three victory points. If the other player can pick up a couple of secrets before you’ve set up your Country Card, then it may just be game over. It reminded me of going to university. When I diligently studied all semester, only to be beaten by someone who crammed the night before the test.
The other downside of these secrets being completely random is that they can determine the game’s outcome. If one player lucks into a couple of three victory point secrets, they can easily run away with the game.
On the other hand, if you end up pulling all one victory point secrets, you feel cheated.
I’m getting into the weeds here, so let’s take a step back.
Spy Wars feels like a work in progress, filled with some great ideas, some good ideas that can be salvaged, and some ideas that are best left in the trash.
My hope for this review is that it galvanises designer Gregory Love to adjust the game. Streamline it with a focus on the initial Intel & Deployment phase and the feeling of being an undercover agency. Because the core of the game is great, but everything else should be up for re-evaluation.
Spy Wars
Players: 2
Playing Time: 60-90 min
Designer: Gregory Love
Publisher: Gregory Love
Spy Wars feels like a work in progress. While the central mechanics of the game are sound, they’re brought down by surrounding mechanisms that aren’t as well thought out.
Pros
- Fun to plot and scheme where you’re planting your Spies and your Decoys.
- Setting up for a big Mission through Influence and Spy Rings can feel great
Cons
- The game goes on for way too long.
- Hard to keep Skills, Missions and Ops cards straight in your head.
- Points feel random at times with Secrets giving you differing amounts of points
- At times it’s thematic, but unopposed Missions shouldn’t be harder than opposed Missions.
You can find more about Spy Wars on its Board Game Geek Page
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Hi all,
I have just pasted below a copy of my reply on BGG to a few of David’s comments in his very balanced and constructive review of Spy Wars.
Firstly, a big thank you to David for taking the time and effort to share his thoughts on the game!
I really appreciate it, and it has certainly inspired me to change some things about the game to improve it. It is correct to say that the game is a work in progress, and I will outline below some of the things I plan to change, design-wise, in a ‘problem – solution’ format. Feel free to comment on these proposed changes, which will soon be included in an updated version of the game rules, which I will post here on BGG.
Problem: Skill Cards.
When designing the game, I thought that matching a spy’s skill set to the requirements of a particular mission was a cool and interesting decision for the player. What I had in mind in terms of game play was players looking at the skill requirements on their mission cards, and assigning a mission card to a particular spy by placing it next to the profile card of the selected spy. There would be no need to remember which spy had what skills, as the 3 skill cards assigned to each spy are right there in front of the player.
In terms of game play, however, this seemed to overload the player with too many difficult choices and mental workload.
Solution: Remove spy skills altogether from the game. Any spy will be able to undertake any mission.
Note that this also removes the need for ‘Teamwork’, whereby two or more spies with the right combined skill set could undertake a mission, in order to satisfy the skill requirements of a mission.
Problem: more difficult to complete unopposed missions.
David indicated in his review that he found it much more difficult to complete unopposed missions (where your opponent has not detected the mission) than opposed missions. This should not be the case, as you would expect it to be easier overall to complete missions when your enemy (i.e., opponent) has not detected and therefore opposed your attempt to complete a mission.
Solution: redesign unopposed missions to make them much easier to successfully complete.
Here is my proposal to greatly simplify how unopposed missions are resolved, and to make them easier to complete:
Roll 1D6, and compare the roll with mission difficulty (1, 2, or 3). Add 1 to the roll if the mission player has a Spy Ring in the country where the mission is attempted. If the D6 roll is > mission difficulty, it succeeds. If not, it fails.
So, with a mission difficulty of 1, the mission will have an 83% chance of success (or automatic success if the mission player has a spy ring in the target country!). With mission difficulty of 2, it has around 66% chance of success. With mission difficulty of 3, it has a 50% chance of success. This way of resolving unopposed missions is simple, and much more likely to succeed, particularly if the mission player has a spy ring in the country where the mission is attempted.
Problem: missions also overload you with information. Detection checks, opposed Missions and unopposed Missions all have unique resolutions with their own minutiae.
Solution: resolving unopposed missions will be significantly easier, due to the change described above.
As for opposed missions, each player simply adds up four numbers and compares their totals to determine if the mission succeeds, or not. To make this easier, I will update the Spy Wars game guide, which provides a simple summary of how to resolve missions, and post it here on BGG.
Problem: setting up a Country is too slow to make it worthwhile. By the time you’ve placed enough Influence (infiltration cubes) to feel comfortable, your opponent has likely completed several smaller Missions.
Solution: Make the infiltration (influence) action more powerful.
Currently, when a spy does an Infiltration action, they place only 1 infiltration cube in a country, representing only one infiltration point. This is too slow.
I propose that when a spy does an infiltration action, they place one cube, but the cube will now be worth 3 infiltration points. This change should make it easier for spies to infiltrate enemy countries to do bribe actions.
Problem: The other downside of these secrets being completely random is that they can determine the game’s outcome.
Solution: Place Secret counters face up during game set-up, showing their VP value. This will take the guess work out of selecting which enemy country to target, as the VP value of every secret is exposed, enabling players to strategically choose their targets.
Other proposed changes:
Here’s a few other ideas which I propose to include in the next version of the game.
1. Reduce the game length to 6 rounds, instead of 10. A fast game is a good game!
2. Reduce the VP required for winning the game from 10 to 8. Make the game easier to win!
3. Reduce the number of countries for each player from 14 to 10. Simplify!
4. Reduce the range of Ops points cards from 1 – 10 to 1 – 6.
5. Reduce hand size (Ops and mission cards) from 8 to 6.
Well, that concludes my thoughts on the game, and my planned changes to it. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, please feel free to post them here, thank you.
It’s great to hear this response to the review, excited to see how the game evolves over the coming months. All the best Greg!