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SpyParty is a spy game about human behavior, performance, perception, and deception. While most espionage games have you spend your time shooting stuff, blowing stuff up, and driving fast, SpyParty has you hide in plain sight, deceive your opponent, and detect subtle behavioral tells to achieve your objectives.
Unlike the suave and confident spies you might find in films or books, most spies in spy games are more like super powered commandos--more Rambo than James Bond. By contrast, SpyParty is a new and quite different game about the more interesting and deeper aspects of being a spy.
Six years ago to the day, Drawnonward posted an entry here titled Depth First, Accessibility Never? where he talked about the game’s depth, how it can intimidate new players, and what we can all do to help mitigate that. The biggest gains to be had, of course, are still on the game development side of things, but now’s a good time to take stock of what we have (and haven’t) done on the community side:
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Like many other players, there’s a piece of my brain that is slowly digesting thoughts about SpyParty nearly every day. During the last two years of interaction with the game I’ve approached the game more as an analyst/caster than a competitive player (where I’ve barely avoided relegation from SCL’s Platinum Division for two seasons); I’ve spent far more time describing SpyParty than playing it. Continue reading
Which missions are the strongest?
There’s much debate in the SpyParty community about this question, and even players who don’t engage in that debate influence it; the way one plays spy is a direct reflection of which missions they believe are strong in various situations. But how do we evaluate mission strength, and by extension, how do the venues we visit affect those evaluations?
We can answer this question by answering two others:
In real life, spies benefit from being anonymous. In SpyParty, they benefit from being notorious.
SpyParty is a game with a lot of skill expression. It’s also very difficult—even those at the top level of play will often say that they feel like they aren’t good enough. Both of these things stem from the fact that SpyParty is a multiplayer strategy game. The mechanics of play and counter-play are well documented and explored within the community, and adapting to your opponent is considered a vital skill to victory. If you don’t know what your opponent is doing to beat you, how can you possibly beat them?
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