I Spy

Party games tend to go over well in my circle of friends, because even though we catch games here and there throughout the month, the last Saturday of each month is marked for everyone to gather. Sometimes the group will divide into separate games on those occasions, but often we'll go with old standbys we know can accommodate that many people. Or, in the case of Spyfall, a new party game discovery.

Spyfall has actually been around a while, being popular enough to spawn some expansions and spin-offs. It was still new to our group. The game is played with stacks of cards illustrating various locations (and full of minor details): the beach, a circus, a costume party...dozens of locations in all. To play a round, each player receives an identical illustration card, except for one player who is instead randomly dealt a card marking them as a spy. They don't get to see the picture everyone else does.

A timer is started, and questions begin to ping-pong around the table. Players are trying to ascertain who the spy is; the spy is trying to bluff their way through their lack of information and figure out where they are before time expires. The first player picks somebody and directs a question to them. ("It's kind of noisy here, don't you think?") That player must respond somehow... ("Maybe, but it's all part of the fun!") and then direct a new question to someone else ("Why are you dressed so odd?"). So on and so on, until either time expires, or one player proposes to the group the identity of the spy and gets a majority of the players to agree. OR until the spy, who can see in the center of the table an array of the possible locations, can deduce where they are and announce it to the group.

It's a neat concept, but I felt the game didn't live up to it in execution. There are simply a lot of rough patches and vague fuzziness in the construction, requiring the players to smooth things over for themselves. Just how much is everyone supposed to look at the common array of locations? Isn't it obvious you're the spy when you look at them? Are you suppose to make copies for each player to keep with them? What kinds of questions are we supposed to ask? What if someone doesn't quite get that there's a role-playing aspect to this and asks "what item do you see in the top left corner of your card?"

We played several rounds of Spyfall on that night it was introduced to us, but it never quite felt like it "worked." Unlike say, Resistance, the parameters of the bluffing seemed too ill-defined. "Are you a good guy or a bad guy?" is an easy matter to explain quickly to new players and have them understand. You just get to enjoy the game. There's no awkward period of "are we doing this right?" -- a period that even after several rounds, we never really pulled out of.

Despite good illustrations and production values, Spyfall felt to me like a game that's passed around like an oral tradition. "Oh, someone showed me how to play Spyfall one time. Here, let's all try!" And then they don't quite explain it right, or remember it right. Or in explaining it differently, they introduce a weird corruption in the game that then gets passed around to the next group.

I could believe there's some fun in Spyfall somewhere. It certainly seems popular enough over on BoardGameGeek. But it left me (and I think most of my group) feeling that there are other bluffing party games we prefer a great deal more. I give Spyfall a C.