Like other party-friendly card games in recent memory, Spyfall hinges pretty largely on the group of people you play it with. In this game's case, that's thanks to a stress on both deception and theatrics. Everybody has to invent both questions and answers, all while keeping pivotal details close to their chest, to figure out their half of an asymmetrical mystery.

Spyfall Price $20 / ~£20 Author Alexandr Ushan Publisher Cryptozoic Players 3-8 Age 13+ Time 10 min BGG rank #13 party game

But unlike other popular party games, Spyfall hinges nearly as much on how you encounter it. The game first grew to prominence in the United States as a print-and-play game—and also came in the form of a pretty handy HTML5-powered app—before finally seeing "official" release in the United States by Cryptozoic Games late last year.

The boxed version that Americans got doesn't stray far from the one sold throughout the world, based on the Ukrainian original by designer Alexandr Ushan and complete with its original artwork. Its adherence to the original presentation is pretty much the only bad part of the game.

J'accuse!







To start a game, get up to eight friends together—though we recommend 5-6 players—and reach into the game box to grab one out of 24 small decks of cards. Each deck has one "spy" card, while the rest list a location ("military base," "circus," "cruise ship," "hospital," etc.) and a corresponding role at said location. Everyone receives one card from the chosen deck and keeps it a secret.

Each deck is matched to a single location, so if you're playing a six-player game and deal a single deck, five people will get a card at, say, the school—with roles like "principal," "security guard," "student," "teacher," and "janitor." The sixth will get a card that simply says "spy," listing no location, no role. An eight-minute timer starts, and the round becomes a spy-versus-everyone-else showdown.

The spy's basic objective is to figure out which of the 24 known locations he or she is at, while the rest of the players try to figure out who the spy is. Both sides must rely on the game's sole, simple mechanic of asking each other questions. A random player asks the first one, and he or she can ask one other person a single question... about anything!

What you ask matters, which is where some less outgoing players may get flustered or annoyed. Nobody on the good-guy side wants to give away the location, so asking a pointed question like, "What'd you think of the homework?" could blow the game. For the same reason, simple questions are usually met with simple answers, since neither a spy nor a good guy wants to say too much. Yes/no questions are particularly bad for this reason, even though they're often the most tempting ones to rattle off when the pressure's on.

A player can pause the action at any time to declare their spy supsicions—"I think Monica's the spy!"—which will bring up a vote. Should everyone but Monica raise their hands in agreement, the round ends, with either the good-guy side winning points for an accurate indictment or the spy winning points if they point a finger at the wrong person. (Without a unanimous vote, the round keeps going.) Alternately, if the spy has a good guess, he or she can declare spy-hood, end the round, and say "I believe we're on the airplane," which will net points if correct or give points to everyone else if not.

Great game, bad box

There's a lot of good screw-with-your-friends potential in Spyfall, as non-spy players must remain cagey in order to keep the spy confused... but in keeping the truth hidden, and offering thin answers to questions, those non-spies may themselves look like spies. Ultimately, a good session revolves around understanding your friends' rhythms in how they tend to answer questions and finding the right styles of interrogation to match up with the current group.

This is one of the most inherently social card games we've ever played, built largely around how personalities play off of each other—especially while playing a game of trust-hot-potato—and so long as you're not a raging introvert, you'll probably find an outlet for laughs and good-hearted teasing. Finding ways to confirm to non-spies that you're at one location—while successfully leading the spy to think you're elsewhere—is among the most satisfying board game moments I've encountered in years. (For starters, I have learned just how many locations fit for the question, "Have you ever seen a bloodbath like that?") There are also some good strategy paths for players on both sides to try, including the spy's ability to fake like a real player and accuse someone else.

Spyfall's biggest catch, honestly, is the box that Cryptozoic is currently shipping to players across the United States. The art direction on the cards is incredibly busy, meaning new players can feel intimidated and confused about the cards they've been dealt. They each include cartoonish, character-loaded scenes based on whatever location they state, but those drawings don't always match up with the roles players have been given. We would've preferred a more understated set of logos and designs to reflect a particular location, but that's possibly a matter of preference, as opposed to a dealbreaker.

Worse is how the game's box fumbles the location list. The main thing that keeps a session of Spyfall feeling grounded, as opposed to limitless and intimidating, is the game's ceiling of 24 locations; players know they have a limited roster of places to guess, which helps both the spy and non-spy sides work up good questions and leading answers. Spies can look to the list for some guidance when they're trying to BS their rivals, while non-spies will love the list just as much in helping them concoct answers that might fit multiple locations and thus confuse the bejeezus out of the sole spy.

But the box only comes with one location list. It's spread across two pages of the instruction manual, and the list is hard to read quickly, thanks to it being covered in so many busy illustrations and small chunks of text. Most print-and-play versions of Spyfall, conversely, come with a "cheat card" template, meant to be printed out eight times—so that every player can have a small reference card to peek at far more discretely. That's far subtler than having a master list that players must pass around—or, worse, ask permission to see—which tends to reveal when a player is either a spy or up to something suspicious.

Cryptozoic's slapdash box doesn't help matters in the presentation department, as it doesn't include deck-sized slots. In fact, it just contains two shrink-wrapped bundles of cards and 24 baggies. Players must separate the cards and baggies themselves, assemble them, and dump them into one big, box-sized pile.

It never failed: Every time I played Spyfall as Cryptozoic intended, players complained about the cards and felt flummoxed by the way the game was presented. Conversely, every time I played the game with either my print-and-play set or the HTML5 app version, the learning phase was over with far more quickly, and the interrogation-fueled fun began a lot sooner. A good party game can live and die by its first five-minute impression, and that's no small factor when it comes to getting new, casual players excited by whatever new game you've brought to game night.

I cannot recommend Spyfall enough in terms of being a must-have party game—and I just as fervently cannot recommend ignoring Cryptozoic's boxed version in favor of sending Alexandr Ushan some Bitcoins and favoring the HTML5 version. In fact, the smartphone-friendly Spyfall has consistently played well at bars, so if you like whiskey and pretending to be at an arctic research station, make sure you bookmark spyfall.meteor.com on your phone post-haste. Otherwise, we can only hope the box and rule changes in the upcoming Spyfall 2, slated for launch later this year, improve the game on all fronts.