This was a fun game to play in! Tom's write up is really the rules he used to run the "game behind the game." (ie the cat and mouse spy game that filled in between the role played adventures) The players were all British miliary men who were dropped into occupied France in 1942. Our job was to establish contact with the resistance, gather intelligence, and committee sabotage. What was truly exciting about this game was that we had to figure out how to do all this while remaining inconspicuous. Tom early on in the game planted the seed in our heads that as the stress of the spy game increased, we would begin to have greater and greater psychological problems. First bad dreams, poor sleep, maybe a need to yawn more, then we might start to get a little more irritable and tense. Who knows if the Nazis will spot this tenseness out in a crowd? Pretty soon he had us wondering if our next door neighbors were really Nazi sympathizers! This was not a game in which players "grew" through experience. We gained a few skills as the game progressed, but the more important part of the game was to develop our own spy networks. To game this, Tom borrowed heavily from the game "Illuminati." Our group started in the middle. As we contacted other groups, Tom would place a circle with their name on it on the page and draw a line connecting the two. As Tom describes, contacts can be one way (ie you know where they live be they don't know where you live) or two way (you both can contact one another). This group "matrix" was important for many reasons. 1. Our contact were how we gained information about the world around us. For instance, I got a job in the parish orphanage. Once there, I recruited boys to go out and paint crosses of Lorraine around town. The ones who did well at this I recruited to do other jobs. The smartest of them, I established as a buffer between my self and the future cross painter (potential recruits). My spies in training, I sent out to observe local nazi movements. They became my eyes and ears. Another player contacted the communists, and hooked into a working cell already planted in a local car factory. They were able to do sabotage work for us on demand. 2. Unfortunately the girl friend of one of our communist agents was in fact a nazi agent who infiltrated our network. The contact between the communists and our group was two way for half of our group. So when the nazi hammer fell, one of our men was able to shoot his way out but the other was captured (and later shot). I escaped, using my church contacts. The other groups members also got out in their own ways. But for all practical purposes our cell was destroyed. Tom gave us a couple of arguments after every game to create and maintain our spy ring. I made arguments about getting work in the local parish, and about teaching the boys there soccer. Slowly, I built up my ring. Another player took on the role of a dumb French peasant and got a job directly working for a German officer. His arguments built up his abllity to gain information in the setting he was in. All the while, Tom made counter arguments about how the nazis were closing in, and how our growing psych problems were interfering with our judgements. Tom's system worked excellently at recreating the feel of the more "real" spy novels, in which the sniveling little spy prays that he will not get caught for a while longer! Tom used free style matrix arguments, like Chris Blair, and had each of us keep a small book of what arguments we had done. As events called for it, he ran role play games of certain exciting events. We trailed and retrieved downed pilots. We evaded German patrol dogs (now that was a difficult game!) We broke an important prisoner out of jail. And we, had to evade being captured when the sky fell down on us. AFTERWARD Tom's approach to spy games is a strong one. I will definitely us it If I ever run a spy game. I am not certain that his rules adequately describe how it works though. Maybe he can write more on it to clear upany questions people might have about it. Back to Experimental Games Group # 22 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com