Act Natural

A buddy of mine* told me about Spyfall. It sounded right up my street A traitor, filler, party game.

Ok it’s not Really a traitor game as such but it’s not far off. Each player gets handed a card from thirty possible stacks all carefully laid out so one player is always the spy.

Each mini stack corresponds to a particular Location. It might be a Starship. A Beach. A School. A Hotel and so on. Additionally each card gives a role so if the randomly selected stack was a pirate ship the roles might be captain, first mate, gunner and of course the spy…

Now here’s the rub. No one knows what the other person’s role is and the spy knows bugger all. The hapless spy doesn’t know the location that’s been picked so they’re up against it from the off.

A round shakes out like this. One random first player picks another player and asks them an insightful question to try and figure out if they’re the spy  or a loyal comrade. They need to ask a question in such a way as to figure out if their target knows the location or if they’re clueless.  All the player have cards in front of them with a full list of all the locations so if they don’t make it obvious they might figure it out.

Here’s an example

Player 1 : (Not a spy, Location : The Artic) : “SOoooo…. Are you going to shave the beard off or leave it?”

Player 2 : (Spy, Thinking it might be a pirate ship they’re on) :  “Well I’m going to leave until this adventure is over….”

The asked player now gets to ask a question.

Player 2 : (Spy) “So…. what the hell did we drink last night?”

and so on.  At any stage a player can go.  HE/SHE’s  the spy! and a unanimous vote sees everyone reveal their cards. Get it right the players get a point each get it wrong the spy scores four.  The same can happen where the spy says,  I’m the spy and I KNOW WHERE WE ARE!  If they get it right they score points otherwise everyone else does

The game resets and a new location is picked and it happens again. For several round.

It’s actually quite good.  Not what I thought it would be.  It’s very hard to be a spy especially in a small group and I reckon you need a minimum of six to make this work but it’s so quick and so repayable you want to go again and again

We played a dozen games last night and we had to stop ourselves playing and go home (well not me I was home).

Like a lot of games I love, it’s just so simple.  Truth be told it’s so simple I dispensed with the cards and wrote a quick application to do the role picking which just goes to show how lazy we are.

This will be front and centre at the next Knavecon and I highly recommend you try it out

Huzzah!

Vic