thread: 2006-07-27 : 10 Observations from my Berlin trip
On 2006-07-31, Valamir wrote:
The thing I love most about Spione is how beautifully the accordion mechanic (which initially I was quite skeptical of) captures the theme of "being in the cold".
There is nothing you can do as a player to increase your odds during a flashpoint. Your cards come up, or they don't. There might be a joker or there might not be. If there is it might help you, help an opponent, or hurt you by making your effect have undesired consequences. Other players may help or hinder. You cannot use good "player tactics" to maximize your chance of success. You cannot use skills, or plans, or preperation, or gear, or contacts, or...anything. No amout of planning, no amount of careful painstaking preperation will have any effect on the outcome of the cards at all.
If theres a better reflection of being completely and utterly adrift in the hands of fate against forces far to powerful for you to have any noticeable impact on, save by shear fortune, I haven't seen it. I'm a HUGE fan of mechanics conveying the flavor of the game, and it was only through playing out a few flashpoints that I really began to grok what being "in the cold" meant.
That said, my first comment from our AP session was in thinking that more cards were necessary early on. The mechanics of covering and doubles are the gears by which the mechanic serves as a creative springboard. Without enough cards in play, those gears don't engage and the early conflicts tend to spin with less traction than they could.
I also don't recall being able to "team up" to effectively get a "double" without a joker or cover being available in the game we played. Am I misunderstanding or is that a new addition?
Other than that, my preference as a rule is for more "hand-holding" (which I prefer to think of "mechanically enabling creativity"). Things like the different state toggles in Afraid, or selecting the type of conflict in Acts of Evil I think give players something to push against which makes it easier to be creative than just having a blank piece of paper.
For Spione something like: Player 1 select spy stuff or guy stuff, player 2 select an element from the web to serve as the source of conflict, player 3 select a supporting cast to serve as an unexpected complication. Player 4 set the stage for a scene incorporating these elements. That may not be the best of examples, but my point is that player 4 will now have a much easier time in crafting a scene inspired by those elements which are now nailed down than they would have crafting a scene from scratch having to assemble all of those elements themselves.
