Spies / Secret Agents

Spyfall: Time Travel

It's a threequel of the award-winning deduction party game from the future — well, and from the past, too!

Get ready for an outstanding time, traveling across the brightest eras and countries! Expose a spy in a neanderthal cave or in a lunar base, hide out in a WWI Airship or in Leonardo's studio, and do your best not to spill all the secrets of the Japanese ninja or of a Spanish entity you surely didn't expect here!

Spyfall: Time Travel is a standalone threequel for Spyfall — an easy-to-learn party game that features bluffing, suspicion, probing questions, and clever answers. At the start of each round, players receive a secret card informing them of the group's location, except for one player who receives the spy card instead. The spy doesn't know where they are, but if they can figure out the location before their cover is blown, they win the round!

This game is fully compatible with other games of Spyfall.

—description from the publisher

Ravnica: Inquisition

Join the Gatewatch or pledge your loyalty to Nicol Bolas in Ravnica: Inquisition, a social-deduction game set on the Magic: The Gathering plane of Ravnica. Each player takes on the role of a representative of a Ravnican guild that is either loyal to the Gatewatch or an Agent of Bolas.

The Gatewatch loyalists are tasked with discovering who the Agents of Bolas are, while the Agents simply need to survive in order to further the schemes of Nicol Bolas.

Players will elect leaders for each of the five colors, but only players whose guilds’ color pairs contains the color may be voted for. Each color leader has a special power they can use to further their goals, and players must be careful when voting, as Nicol Bolas’s influence may grow. Once all the color leaders have been elected, a vote is held to eliminate one player. Once the dust has settled, players will reveal their roles, and if the Agents of Bolas were eliminated, the Gatewatch wins.

—description from the publisher

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game – Daybreak Expansion

Game description from the publisher:

The Battlestar Galactica, humanity's last beacon of hope, falters and crumbles. A tenuous solidarity between human and Cylon wavers under overwhelming desperation and doubt. For those seeking the promise of peace, a single vessel guards the future. The Demetrius, guided by unknown forces, plots a course through the stars – a course for home. Many would oppose this vision of the future. In this desperate time, both human and Cylon are driven to take matters into their own hands. For some, this means risking everything. For others, this means mutiny.

Battlestar Galactica: Daybreak Expansion brings humanity's plight to its gripping climax. With two supplemental game boards, twelve new character sheets, thirty new Crisis cards, twenty-five new Skill cards, and much more, Daybreak invites players to undertake desperate missions, struggle under the constant threat of mutiny (through the addition of a Mutineer card in the Loyalty deck that can affect either human or Cylon), and bargain with Cylon Leaders driven by motives of their own!

Daybreak also includes rules and components for an optional Battlestar Galactica experience titled "The Search for Home", featuring a new endgame and a new game board for the Demetrius, the sewage processing ship that becomes the fleet's best hope of salvation.

Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time

Professor Evil owns a time machine, and he's been ripping off all the best historical items from times both past and future. Your team has been charged with confiscating these items and returning them to their proper locations in time, so you now need to infiltrate the mansion and abscond with four items before Prof. Evil can secrete four of them in locations inaccessible to you. Thankfully the old soul is a bit daft and won't evaporate you should he catch you lurking through the mansion, but simply scoot you out the front door where he'll forget about you immediately.

On a turn, you first draw and reveal two cards from your tiny deck, then keep one of the cards based on what you think will help you this turn. You then take three actions, such as open a door in the room you're in, move from a room (or outside) to another room (assuming the door is open), disable a trap, or grab a treasure; using a card isn't an action unless it says otherwise. You can repeat actions as desired or needed, but you can't enter a room with Prof. Evil and you can't exit the house on your own (in order to run across the grounds to another window) once you enter. You're now committed to grabbing those treasures!

After you finish your turn, Prof. Evil now moves, but again he's not all there, so he doesn't necessarily move in a logical manner. To move him, you roll three dice: One die advances the secondary Prof. Evil figure on the clock on the board either five or ten minutes; the other two determine where Prof. Evil moves and how far. What's more, as he walks through rooms, he closes the doors through which he travels and reactivates any inactive traps he encounters. If you roll a blue and a 1, for example, he moves through the blue doorway into the next adjacent room; a red and a 3 will move him through three rooms, walking through the red doorway each time. A color and a particular signal will teleport him immediately to the treasure bearing the same colored marker.

Let's look at these treasures in more detail: Each treasure shows a time value and one or more traps on it. Three treasures are placed on the board, then a blue, red and green token are placed on the treasures, with a matching blue, red and green token placed on the game board clock on the time matching what's on the treasure. The Magna Carta might say 45 minutes, for example, and after placing a blue token on the Magna Carta, you place a blue token on the clock 45 minutes away from where the Prof. Evil figure is located. If Prof. Evil moves onto this token on the clock, then that treasure is lost — and if you lose four treasures, then you've lost the game. Remove it from play and replace it with a new treasure, marking the proper time on the clock.

Note that you can't just grab a treasure, however. Professor Evil can't be in the same room (of course), but you also must ensure that all the traps shown on the treasure are currently deactivated. The game board starts with eight traps on it — half active, half not — and you'll play tug-of-war with Professor Evil over keeping them in this status. Collect a treasure, and a new one will be added to the game board; collect four treasures before Prof. Evil does, and you all win Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time.

Secrets

In Secrets, the second co-design between Eric Lang and Bruno Faidutti, players are assigned a hidden team — the CIA or KGB — and are trying to collect the most points for their side. In addition, one or two players are secretly anti-establishment Hippies who are working for nobody. Their goal is to fight the Man and have the fewest points.

On your turn, offer one of two randomly drawn agent cards to another player. These cards are worth points and have varying good or bad abilities. That player either accepts the agent, in which case they score it, or they refuse, in which case the card returns to you, and you score it. The game ends when a player has five cards, after which the teams are revealed; the team with the highest combined score wins, unless a Hippie has the single lowest score, in which case they win.

The interactions between the character cards are the spice of the game, but since the abilities are discoverable during play, the game can be taught in three minutes.