A Creator’s First Critical Play
Location: Crusader Army
Player 1: How long do you typically spend here?
Spy: Uhh… 1 to 2 weeks…
You’d think this would be an obvious giveaway but somehow the spy still ended up winning.
Welcome to Spyfall. Spyfall is a game created by Cryptozoic Entertainment. I recently played at least 10 rounds of it with two of my friends over Zoom using both netgames.io and Spyfall.app. Each provided a slight variation on the game play which made for some interesting changes and actually lead to different levels of engagement and enjoyment.
In general, Spyfall seems to be targeted for young adults who enjoy quick but social deduction games. The goal of the game is to determine who the spy is by asking each other questions about where the players are. Only the normal players are given the location and the spy has only been told that they are the spy. The trick is that at the end if the spy correctly guesses the location then they win. Therefore, the players are attempting to figure out who doesn’t know the location without giving away the location. This tension is the heart of the enjoyment.
Through our 10+ rounds of Spyfall, we continued to enjoy ourselves the whole time and finally had to cut ourselves off based solely on how late it had gotten.
However, it began with a rocky start. Our first round lasted three questions. With just one answer from each of us, we already knew who the spy was. Our group was just about ready to give up on the game entirely, but we decided to try again. The next round was much more successful.
In this case, successful doesn’t necessary mean that we won. It means that our enjoyment was high. Digging deeper, successful means that we had an adequate tension between the questions and answers such that we didn’t know for sure who the spy was. Our final choice was an educated guess rather than an absolute right answer.
One of the hilarious standout moments from the rounds was the first time the spy got the location correct. One of the players asked the spy a question and the spy’s answer gave them away immediately. However, the question also gave away the location so the spy won. This shows you exactly what happens when the tension between information and secrecy slips closer towards information.
The other standout moment was when the spy gave an obviously incorrect answer, but the normal characters still didn’t guess them. That was an interesting failure of tension that overlapped with a failure of deduction which caused the spy to win.
Luckily for this group, each person did an adequate job managing this tension for the majority of the games. However, this is an important failure point. If even just one person is consistently too obvious in their questions or answers, it can ruin the whole game. It can make the spy too easy to guess or the location too easy for the spy to guess.
Spyfall.app provides a solution for this failure point. They offer a suggested question at the bottom of the page. This can help teach players what types of questions can be asked along with keeping the game moving by making sure that everyone always has a question they can ask when they’re stumped.
Additionally, Spyfall offers photos of each location to help players better visualize the places. It also allows players to x out locations in order to eliminate options and help the spy determine the location. Finally, it gives players a character/role to play at the location. Our group didn’t take advantage of this feature but it’s an interesting layer to explore to give a more RPG feeling to the game. All of these additions, helped our group stay more engaged by spending less time thinking of questions.
Personally, one of my main overall frustrations was the randomness of the spy designation. Of our 10+ games, one of the players was spy once, I was spy three times, and the last player was the spy the rest of the games. I wish we could have had the choice be a more balanced random. Having the same person be the spy again and again gets tiring because their answers are always more vague and you start wondering if that’s because they’re the spy or because they’re just vague.
Despite all of that, Spyfall is a simple but enjoyable deduction game that forces players to keep the tension between information and secrecy. It’s a somewhat cooperative game as a non-spy, but you’re also working alone so that works well for more competitive people. This is a great game night addition for groups who enjoy short focused games that rely on individuals creating and providing all of the information.
