Spyfall Critical Play
About the Game
Spyfall was released as a board game in 2015 by Cryptozoic, but I played the shorter mobile version. This game is intended for at least 3 players of age 13+. The game is a deception and guessing game, allowing for the players to make bluffs, lie, and try to outsmart the spy.
Players
Each game one player is chosen as the spy and the other players who are not the spy are given a location. No other identities are known to the player except for their own.
In this game I happened to be the spy. The other players’ cards look similar, except they were given one of these locations:
Overview and Objectives
Once the game begins the resources are limited by setting a certain amount of time to ask questions about the given location on the non-spy’s card. These questions are to help resolve who is the spy. Although the spy uses these questions to try to guess the correct location of the other players. Therefore, we can see that there are two main different objectives for this game, one for each type of player.
- The spy is trying to guess the location/not be discovered as the spy
- the other players are trying to guess who the spy is without revealing the location.
This enables a wide range of player interactions, as each person may not be aiming for the same goal.
My Experience and Analysis
I played the game with a total of 3 players, so the interactions were relatively simple. After a few questions we were able to determine who the spy was (happened to be the same person for each of the 3 times we played).
The first time we played the game we were very confused at how discrete we were supposed to be about the location, but that was just our poor direction reading skills. The second game was better, but we were still able to guess the spy within a couple of questions. Therefore the 3 minutes given for questioning time seemed way too long for only 3 players. The third time we played was similar to the second. We guessed extremely quickly, so instead we focused on making sure the spy couldn’t guess the location, so he wouldn’t win.
Overall this game was relatively fun, but I think it would be a lot better with more players, or even raising the minimum amount of players to 4 or 5. This would make it easier for the spy to blend in and try to guess the location, making for a more difficult and interactive game.
