The Map Board (Victory track and other incidentals not shown)
Click here for view at 50% of real size
Designer: Rick Holzgrafe
with help from the Board Game Designer Forum
especially sedjtroll and Nando
This game is under development, and the rules and components are not final.
Each player operates the Military Intelligence organization of a different nation. All players' nations are at war with the nation of Enigmia. Players attempt to recruit agents within Enigmia, obtain secrets, and transport those secrets out of Enigmia so that they can be used to win the war.
The players' nations are uneasy allies, and their primary goal is to help each other defeat Enigmia. But each nation secretly plots to be the dominant survivor of the war once Enigmia has been defeated. Players must compete to get the lion's share of the best secrets!
There are two kinds of Agents: Moles, and Couriers. To get secrets out of Enigmia, players must recruit at least one Mole, whose job is to obtain Secrets. Then players must recruit a chain of Couriers, whose job is to pass secrets from the Mole and from one Courier to another, to a Port at the border. A complete chain of Agents from a Mole to a Port is called a Route.
Secrets that have successfully been removed from Enigmia can be used in battles against Enigmia. Each Secret is worth a certain number of Victory Points. Those used in battle against Enigmia are discarded after the battle. At the end of the game, the player whose remaining Secrets add up to the most Victory Points wins! But be careful -- if Enigmia wins too many battles, Enigmia wins the war and all players lose!
There are three decks of Secret Cards: one deck contains Security Level One ("Restricted") Secrets; one deck contains Security Level Two ("Top Secret") Secrets; and one contains Security Level Three ("Eyes Only") Secrets. Higher Security Levels generally mean more Victory Points, which means that they are more valuable as well as riskier to obtain.
The board also displays a Round Track, which runs from 1 to 21. The position of the Round Marker on this track shows which round is in progress, and in which round battles may occur (see Battles below).
Finally the board also displays a Victory Track, where the players' Victory Markers are used to record their scores.
Each Mole Token and matching Secrets stack are marked with a unique Agent ID and the emblem and color of the agent's nation, so that there is no doubt who owns each agent and which token goes with which stack of Secrets.
Players select a Starting Player (perhaps the player who can reveal the most interesting secret).
The Starting Player chooses any Location on the board that is not a Port, and places one of his Moles there. The remaining players also place one Mole each, in clockwise order.
The last player to have placed a Mole then places one of his Couriers at any unoccupied Location (including Ports), then places one Special Investigator. The Special Investigator must be placed at any unoccupied Level 2 or Level 1 Location (that is, not at a Level 3 Location nor at a Port). The other players do the same, in counter-clockwise order.
Finally, the Starting Player places the Round Marker at position 1 on the Round Track.
Each player places one Mole for free at the start of the game (see below). Each player may have at most 3 Moles and 8 Couriers in play at any time.
A Mole's job is to obtain Secrets. A Mole may keep his Secrets (stacked in his spot on the Mole Placard) as long as the Player wishes, but Secrets in a Mole's possession cannot be used in battle and are lost (not counted) at the end of the game. To deliver Secrets back to HQ where they can be used, a Mole must be part of a Route. A Route is an unbroken chain of adjacent Locations containing Couriers, which ends at a Port that also contains a Courier. Note that more than one Player's Agents may participate in a Route, but captured Agents may not participate in a Route.
A Mole who is part of a Route may deliver his Secrets at any time; delivered Secrets go to HQ (the Player's hand) and may be used in battle and in scoring at the end of the game.
When an agent is captured, turn the agent's token face-down. A captured Agent may not participate in a Route and is effectively out of play, but remains on the map for a while to signal that the Enigmia Secret Police are especially interested in this Location. No spy activity will be possible at that Location while the captured Agent is still in place. The captured Agent will be removed from the map at a later time (see Removing Captured Agents below).
Captured agents that have been removed from the map may be returned to the board in any later turn by using the appropriate Action.
The structure of a turn is:
Before taking his turn in a blue round, and if no battle has yet occurred in this group of blue-and-red rounds, the Starting Player rolls the die. If the result is 1 or 2, a battle occurs immediately. (See Battle below.)
If the Round Marker is on a red location on the track, and no battle has occurred in the previous blue rounds in the group, a battle must occur before the Starting Player takes his turn in that round.
After the battle, the Starting Player proceeds with the rest his turn as usual.
The available actions and their cost in Action Points are:
Then roll the die. If the result is 1 or 2, the Mole falls under Suspicion. Place a Suspicion Marker at the Mole's Location. (See Suspicion and Captured Agents below.)
If the Mole is part of more than one Route, specify the exact Route including the final Port. Then deliver all of the Mole's Secret Cards to the Player who owns the Courier at the selected Port. (Usually this will be you, but it could be any other Player if you decide that the delivery is crucial to winning an upcoming battle!)
Whenever Secrets are transmitted, there is a chance that an Agent participating in the Route will fall under suspicion. Roll the die to determine which (if any) Agent falls under suspicion. If the result is:
1 2 3 4 5 67 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
The positions shown in blue and red are rounds in which a battle may occur. Only one battle occurs in each group of colored rounds and there are four such groups, so there are always four battles in all. At the start of each blue round in which no battle occurred the previous round, the Starting Player rolls the die; a battle occurs on a roll of 5 or 6. A battle always occurs at the start of a red round unless a battle already occurred on either of the previous two rounds.
When a battle occurs, secretly select some or all of your available Secret Cards to contribute towards the battle; the other Players all do the same. Then all Players simultaneously reveal their selected Secret Cards.
Add 1 Victory Point to the base value for each prior battle that has occurred in the game. (Example: in the first battle, a Secret Card showing 3 VP is worth 3; in the second battle the same card would be worth 4 VP; in the third battle it would be worth 5 VP, and so on.) Your total Battle Points for the battle is the sum of the values of the Secret cards you played in that battle.
In each battle, Enigmia itself will win some number of Battle Points, automatically. (The amount will be derived from a table printed on the board, perhaps with a small random modifier.) Enigmia's Battle Points will be higher in the later battles than in the early ones. If the Allies' Combined Battle Total is less than the Battle Points won by Enigmia, the players have lost that battle and Enigmia has won it.
If the players win the war, then after the final battle each player claims extra Victory Points for his remaining Secrets, if any. Each Secret is worth its base value plus 4 points. When all remaining Secrets have been tallied and the Otherwise the player with the most Victory Points at the end of the game wins. (TBD: Tie breakers. Stuff like the most agents in play, or add the security levels of all agents in Enigmia and the win goes to the Player with the largest sum.)
The current design better utilizes the notion of building infrastructure, a game pattern wherein players must create a structure of some kind over time, and use the structure to gain victory points. The infrastructure here, of course, is the Route.
Secrets can now be brought out of Enigmia in a single action, once the infrastructure is in place; and Routes can be assembled fairly quickly. This should speed up the game and reduce the tedium.
Player interaction is greatly increased in this design. The initial setup and the larger number of Special Investigators gives players much more opportunity to interfere with their opponent's plans. Also it is possible to "hijack" another player's Route, and force his Mole to deliver secrets into someone else's (presumably your own) hands.
Players also have more choices, and more significant choices, in version 2. Being able to place agents nearly anywhere, having more Special Investigators, and deciding whether Action Points are best spent in building alternate Routes, farming Secrets, harvesting Secrets, or harassing opponents gives players a wider variety of useful things to do.
Finally, version 2 has simpler rules. The Secrets Cards in version 1 had four different values on them, to resolve a variety of risk situations. In this version, there are only the Victory Points on each card.
Battle
What's the purpose of the rule allowing Enigmia to win? I think that (unlike Shadows Over Camelot) it's not to make it difficult for the players to defeat the game. Winning should be easy, and a loss to Enigmia should reveal great player incompetence. The point is to enforce a balance between obtaining secrets and transmitting them: the rule requires every battle to be fought, and therefore requires a constant flow of secrets out of Enigmia. Otherwise, the wisest plan would be to quickly make a mole at Level 3, then farm secrets (and maintain a Route) until just before the final battle, then transmit them all out at once. Boring!
The purpose of increasing the value of a Secret in each subsequent battle (and after the final battle) is to tempt players to take risks by holding back in early battles: players can flirt with danger in order to increase the value of their own Secrets. This creates a tension against the loss-to-Enigmia rule.
For about a day, the rule was that Secrets played in battle would not count as Victory Points for individual players; the players' final scores would come entirely from left-over Secrets withheld from all battles. But I realized that a losing player would have no reason to contribute to the final battle: the player would reason that he will lose for certain if he gives up any more secrets, so why not keep them all just in case the other players manage to win the final battle on their own. So I returned to the original idea, that Secrets played in battle also contribute to players' individual scores. The latest change was to add a little bit to the value of Secrets not used in any battle, to create a small incentive to hold a few Secrets back in the final battle.
Of course, one player could just shrug and say, "you all better battle hard because I'm not going to." Such a jerk would either end the game by his non-cooperation, or always win if the other players cave in by contributing more than their share to early battles. So (as in AGOT) perhaps there should be a punishment for contributing the fewest Secrets to a lost battle. The punishment should be a loss of hoarded Secrets: the player must discard at random some appropriate number of Secret Cards. Impoverished players who were forced into the loss would therefore not be punished, as they would have no Secrets to give up.
New ways to earn VPs
I had a problem with a couple of the actions. Why would anyone bother moving a Special Investigator or Planting a Rumor? Each action costs 1 Action Point, and a player only gets (on average) 10 APs per battle, so it seemed that players would spend their APs on improving and using their own routes rather than on interfering with the other players. After all, you can only screw over one other player at a time.
So I made it easier to plant a rumor, to remove any barriers to its use (Seth suggested this but I didn't understand why it was a good idea for a while), and awarded 1 VP to the active player for choosing this action. Knowing that another player can exploit a weak point in your route and get a VP for it should make the players sweat a bit.
I also added the Extract an Agent action. Historically, real intelligence agencies will protect their agents, to the point of trying to remove them from danger if they fall under suspicion or threat of arrest. The action not only enhances the theme but gives players something else to do with a threatened agent: they can accept the loss of the agent, pick up a VP as compensation, then get on with repairing their route.
9/6/05 - Version 2 posted, with major changes. In v2, the original concept of Courier agents who must travel either to become Moles or to carry Secrets, was dropped in favor of a more static arrangement where Moles and Couriers are simply dropped into place and Secrets are instantaneously transmitted out of Enigmia once an unbroken Route of Couriers is established. See Design Notes above for a more detailed discussion.
9/7/05 - Corrected and fleshed out the discussion of when battles occur, and went back to the original scoring plan where Battle Points used in battle are also added as Victory Points for the players' total scores. Added rules concerning Locations that remain under suspicion after a capture.
9/8/05 - Added images of the board (the map of Enigmia).
9/9/05 - Changed "Plant a Rumor" to allow placing a Suspicion Marker anywhere (instead of only where there's a Special Investigator); awarded the active player 1 VP for planting a rumor; added the Extract an Agent action. Cleaned up the explanations of a couple points that were muddy.