Hey everyone. I'm currently working on a spy themed game for NaGaDeMon. It's a take on modern espionage and counter-intelligence. I have a good idea how this card driven game is going to work at a very high level, but the nitty-gritty low level mechanics are still kind of up in the air.
I really need to figure out how some other games have handled secrets, intrigue, deception, and betrayal. I would like for the secret agents in my game to be co-opted by your opponent without your knowledge. I'd like the possibility of double agents, honey-pots, and traps to exist in the game. Basically a hidden game-state that may never be revealed. I need some inspiration to figure out how to make this work.
One of my main inspirations so far is the Battlestar Galactica board game. There are plenty of great secret-keeping mechanics in that game that are ripe for the picking, but it still doesn't directly address my main problem. Your agents... cards you control, may have motivations that you don't know about, and take actions that you don't intend. In BSG, you are the actor with the motivation, so the game is keeping that a secret and making progress.
If you have any ideas, or any games I should check out for inspiration please let me know! Thanks! -Andy
All of these ideas are excellent and give me lots of great ideas to continue with.
Missions - I like this idea of how missions would work. You could have multiple skill requirements and the need to meet all those requirements. An interesting sort of push and pull would be, if you need more than one agent to complete the mission, it increases the chances of the mission not being kept under wraps or being compromised in some way.
Keywords - I am definitely going to use this idea for motives. Basically a character can have different motivations, and card effects can play off those. This is how you compromise enemy agents.
Intel gathering - I like all of these actions, although I'm a little unclear as to how the intel chips work. I think any game like this needs actual intelligence and info represented by some kind of mechanic, and this seems like a good start.
Putting it all together - I think what I'm going to do is, instead of missions, have 'targets'. These targets have a certain number of intelligence points that are available to extract from the target. Each target lists the skill requirements that need to be met in order to extract intel.
Targets can be military installations, individuals, computer servers, etc.
I think agents will be a list of skills, with values, and soem other keywords. Or maybe there is no difference between skills and keywords, either way... I think when an agent goes into play, you take another character card, face down, and place it underneath that agent. A character card that is face down and underneath another character card is no longer a 'character', but his motivations represent the face-up characters 'secret' motivations and loyalties.
You can then have characters who, when face down, do different stuff. For example, a character who has very high skills, but when he is face down on another character, his loyalty is to a completely different faction than yours.
The only other thing I think this needs before I start building some things is how to hide your actions and targets from your opponent when his cards are in play in front of him. I'm thinking about play screens, or a pad of paper where you write down targets.