Game Review: Deck of Spies

The dungeon crawl genre of playing card solitaires might need some new ideas, but we're getting a free retheme too.

Deck of Spies is James Newman's take on the dungeon crawl, where instead of killing all the monsters in the dungeon you have to recruit enough top spies in a wide field of espionage. With a low starting hand you are to outwit and recruwit your way through a graduating deck with the goal of recruiting more than half of the court cards that appear at the end.

You face one agent at a time, to counter it you play any combination of cards equal or higher than its value (Aces 1, courts 11, 12, 13), recruiting it is similar but you have to match the agent's suit. For the purposes of recruiting, you can use an ace to change the other cards in your hand to its suit, still keeping value. The ace's single point still counts and the card will be used. To simplify, countering removes a card from the game while recruiting puts it in your draw deck.

If your hand does not have enough cards to counter, an assassination is necessary, using any ace still in play to remove it from play, but so will the ace(if you run out of aces for an assassination situation you lose the game). You can clear your hand of cards after a counter or recruit but only in multiples of the same rank.

While at first glance this plays as a game where you have to plod through a gallery of enemies, the key difference is the goal, instead of simply killing everything, you have to bring into your side enough of the bosses at the end. This change in goal also means a change in strategy; the balance between hand power and hand shape favors the latter in this game.

The graduated approach to enemies gives the game a manageable difficulty curve and makes building your hand less chancy, you can even strategize which cards you'll counter. Aces can be a bit too powerful for recruiting, but the more aces you sit in your deck the less powerful your hand becomes, so it evens out strategically. Still, aces are key players and will take the bulk of recruiting.

With an interesting approach to a theme and the simplicity of its execution, the game won both the solitaire category and the overall winner of the inaugural Traditional Deck Game Design Contest, a worth winner and a fun bit of strategic card gaming, even if the powercreep might not be to everyone's liking.