🎪 First Impressions: Family + Spy
Dec. 1st, 2025 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightFirst Impressions: Family + Spy
What is it?
It’s a hack of a game I’ve never heard of (Lasers and Feelings) for a group of characters, with a setting (Cold War) I’m not really interested in. I snagged it when it was free a good while ago; it’s not for me.
Is it playable out of the box?
I don’t think so. At least for me there are not enough instructions. This may be something you figure out with your group, but the concept does not make sense for soloing.
With only four d4 tables, replayability is limited, and the resulting prompts are somewhat generic:
An East/West agent wants to pacify/occupy a foreign dignitary. Complication: A trusted ally turns traitor.
(I wanted it to be ‘You’re very tired’ but no such luck.)
Amendments:
A very strong Session Zero; this game involves lying to other players. You’re all spies. You may be on different sides.
I’d also want more random tables and a lot of materials for the setting; even I don’t feel my geography is good enough to play this convincingly, and my geography is probably better than most.
Tools
1d6, an understanding of the setting.
Price:
$1 (currently $0)
Verdict
🎪 Not my circus, not my monkeys.
This sounds so not like me that I wondered why I grabbed it; probably because someone mentioned it positively? I’d like to think that even a year or two ago I was more discerning. Cold War, spy stories, betrayals… not the first things I’d gravitate to.
Since the random tables are very brief and don’t combine well (if you want to combine multiple tables, all entries need to work with every other entry; here this is not the case) I feel you’ll have to make a tremendous amount of effort for something that would probably be better as a board game with limited options and clear rules. In a board game, if someone draws a ‘you betray another player’ card, it’s not the player’s fault, it’s the designer’s, and you all signed up for this to be possible. When you betray your real life friend in a made-up scenario and could have chosen a different action, it can feel different. Because there’s so little substance here, it’s near impossible to playtest this – this is a game that will turn out very differently at different tables – and I have my doubts about how playable this is, and how much fun it will turn out to be.
What is it?
It’s a hack of a game I’ve never heard of (Lasers and Feelings) for a group of characters, with a setting (Cold War) I’m not really interested in. I snagged it when it was free a good while ago; it’s not for me.
Is it playable out of the box?
I don’t think so. At least for me there are not enough instructions. This may be something you figure out with your group, but the concept does not make sense for soloing.
With only four d4 tables, replayability is limited, and the resulting prompts are somewhat generic:
An East/West agent wants to pacify/occupy a foreign dignitary. Complication: A trusted ally turns traitor.
(I wanted it to be ‘You’re very tired’ but no such luck.)
Amendments:
A very strong Session Zero; this game involves lying to other players. You’re all spies. You may be on different sides.
I’d also want more random tables and a lot of materials for the setting; even I don’t feel my geography is good enough to play this convincingly, and my geography is probably better than most.
Tools
1d6, an understanding of the setting.
Price:
$1 (currently $0)
Verdict
🎪 Not my circus, not my monkeys.
This sounds so not like me that I wondered why I grabbed it; probably because someone mentioned it positively? I’d like to think that even a year or two ago I was more discerning. Cold War, spy stories, betrayals… not the first things I’d gravitate to.
Since the random tables are very brief and don’t combine well (if you want to combine multiple tables, all entries need to work with every other entry; here this is not the case) I feel you’ll have to make a tremendous amount of effort for something that would probably be better as a board game with limited options and clear rules. In a board game, if someone draws a ‘you betray another player’ card, it’s not the player’s fault, it’s the designer’s, and you all signed up for this to be possible. When you betray your real life friend in a made-up scenario and could have chosen a different action, it can feel different. Because there’s so little substance here, it’s near impossible to playtest this – this is a game that will turn out very differently at different tables – and I have my doubts about how playable this is, and how much fun it will turn out to be.
