Designer: Robin David
Graphic Design: Tiffany Moon
Year: 2016
Genre: Spy based bidding game
Players: Two to four
Ages: 12+ (My opinion)
Playing Time: Ten to fifteen minutes
MSRP: $12.00 Kickstarter pledge; likely $15.00 retail price after production
While most of our audience is used to seeing us tackle deep, meaty, and sometimes fairly epic games here at TGG that certainly doesn’t mean I don’t dig much smaller footprint games which help get a night of gaming rolling. Sorry to say a good number of the lighter games I run across don’t exactly float my boat simply because they turn out to be too light; there isn’t much “there” there to get my gaming juices flowing. Yet every once in a while I encounter a small game which deserves your attention. Sub Rosa: Spies for Hire is one of those titles.
Just hitting Kickstarter yesterday, from Dublin based designer David Robin, Sub Rosa is a micro game (and I do mean micro) where players attempt to recruit agents to their cause. In essence, the player represents a “handler” aiming to add as many recruits as possible while blocking other handlers from doing the same. The game includes five, dual sided mercenary agent cards and twenty eight bidding tokens broken into four colors. The tokens are numbered two through six, with two tokens marked with a value of three, as well as a single action token. The mercenary cards each show a special action which can be played if someone uses their action token on that card.
Sub Rosa plays out in a series of turns where the players will place a single token next to an individual agent. If the token is numbered then it’s placed face down so other players don’t know what you’re bidding for that mercenary’s allegiance. Additional tokens for an agent are laid in a descending column alongside the card. After the final round, the player with the highest combined value of tokens for an agent wins that mercenary. What makes Sub Rosa interesting is the special abilities of the agents.
Since each player holds an action token, it’s important to look at the ability of each of the agents. By playing your action you might be able to move tokens from one agent to another, swap agents while leaving tokens in place, force players to swap a token already played, look at the values of placed tokens and more. You can toss a serious wrench into the works of fellow players by cleverly using your action token so there’s a light bit of “take that” to the proceedings.
In a two player game play continues until both players have used all of their tokens. With three or four players you’ll continue until everyone has one remaining token. Once you hit the end game, total up the values to see who won each of the agents; the lowest token in an agent’s colulm also has one deducted from its value. Those action tokens also count as a value of three toward recruitment. Whoever has the most agents is declared the winner and in the case of a tie (in the three or four player games) the player with the highest value token left is the victor.
Even with a full compliment of four players the game moves quickly and should be completed within fifteen minutes.
While I don’t normally straight out review a game running on Kickstarter, I feel the version of Sub Rosa I received is close enough to the final product to confidently provide a review score. There’s quite a lot to like about Sub Rosa and a few things which I think could be polished up a touch.
Although Sub Rosa is partly presented as a bluffing game, I didn’t find a whole lot of bluffing taking place in our playthroughs. There really isn’t a call for much bluffing as players are going about placing their tokens and taking their single action. This isn’t to say you won’t find yourself and your friends doing a bit of bluffing while you play but it isn’t an integral mechanic built into the game.
Sub Rosa isn’t a heavily themed game either. Yet, truth be told, most light games aren’t usually strongly tied to theme either so I don’t have a problem with that as I enjoy games like Love Letter and you certainly can’t ever say Love Letter is dripping in theme. Also Sub Rosa’s artwork is a bit “soft.” I’m not knocking Tiffany Moon’s graphic design but there is a print and play vibe to the proceedings which might turn off potential Kickstarter backers. Of course I received a print on demand version of the game (Mr. David actually was kind enough to have my game printed locally in Dublin to get a copy in my hands) so I’ll guess there’s some tighter artwork in the works for the final product.
I found it interesting how the agents in play can radically change the approach you take to winning the game. Some agent setups may drive you to use your single action token earlier in the game to gain an advantage while other random setups might lead you to keep that action in your pocket until the very last possible minute. I had to laugh when people I played with were talking about new agents that could be introduced to Sub Rosa and how they wished for the ability to play just one more action during the game to create a whole lot of chaos.
Usually when I play games with a pretty low price point the reaction of most of my gamers is “Thank God that’s over…” This certainly wasn’t the case with Sub Rosa. I can also happily report the finished product will be immensely portable (packaged in the style of the classic Steve Jackson Games clamshells) and the funding goal is quite reasonable and not set up to pay someone’s mortgage for the next five years…
By all means you should check out the Kickstarter for Sub Rosa. Obviously this isn’t a title which is going to be everyone’s cup of tea but it’s nice to see a game, with such a low price point, that involves needing to fire up some of those brain neurons rather than something which is a hackneyed rip off of a popular game or requiring you to “roll and move” ad nauseam.
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