Agent

Board game Agents. The Shield and the Sword (hereinafter simply the Agents), made by the hands of Russian authors, allows us to play for the management of the foreign intelligence of one of the major countries. And even if you are not impressed by the serious topic of this game, I still recommend that you read my review, because the gameplay of this board may seem interesting to you.

Composition The game comes in a big box, aka bigbox. And I can’t help but write that the size of the box is much larger than its contents. Inside you will find plump player pads and the same plump region cards, a deck of agent and secret mission cards, token pouches and a bunch of small money and agent tokens.

The tokens were in the box not squeezed out (but everything turned out great), and everything else was neatly packaged in bags. The quality of the components is very good – I did not find any burrs or notches. There is no doubt about the quality of a Star. Spy get out of the bag In this game, you need to fight for control over territories (for example, there is the USSR, North America, Western Europe, as well as entire sectors consisting of several regions).

The main mechanic of the game is taking tokens from the bag and placing them on the territory boards. But the funny thing about the game is that you can get not only your agent out of the bag, but also someone else’s.

The Agents have fairly simple rules, but a rather dreary preparatory process. several sectors are laid out on the table, consisting of several regional cards. Each region and sector receives its own token, for which players will fight.

Then a little tedious part begins – you need to separate all the received tokens in piles (with a dark background in one pile, with a white background in another), put 3 random tokens with a white background on the empty cells of your region, then put 3 random agents in your bag and 1 random token with a white background into the opponents’ bags. As a result, in front of each player there must be 7 closed agent tokens, which are also a round counter. After receiving $ 3 and a secret mission card from the bank, you can start playing.

The gameplay is very simple and enjoyable. On his turn, the player performs 5 simple actions on points. Namely: checking the victory condition. If a player has 5 or more victory points at the beginning of the round, then he wins the game. Points are given to tokens of regions and sectors, a secret mission card, and each successful elimination of an alien agent gives 0.5 points; the introduction of one of his agents into someone else’s bag The agent is taken from the very closed tokens lying in front of the players, and you can put it on any player. For $ 1, you can add one of your open agent tokens (with a dark background) to the same bag; dislocation of an agent from his pouch. We take the token out of our pouch and place it on any free cell of any region tablet. An agent can be caught by his own, and maybe a stranger. For $ 2, you can put your diplomat token into the region (other players cannot remove it from the region in any way); carrying out the operation.

There are 4 types of them: get a dollar for each of your agents in the active region (this is the region where you put the token from the bag in the second phase); see up to 3 agents in the active region; move your agent token from any other region to the active region; turn over the closed token of the opponent’s agent in the active region (if there is an informant (typewriter), then the token is returned to the owner’s bag, and you take an agent card with a useful property; if there is an operative (pistol) there, then the token remains in the region upside down , and the owner of the token receives the agent card); receiving an operational summary.

By performing actions, you change the situation in the regions. Influence tokens are redistributed based on who owns the regions and sectors (the one with more tokens owns the regions and sectors). I’d like to point out that there are two types of agent cards – with a permanent and a one-time effect. The properties of the cards help to better introduce your agents into the regions or remove foreign agents that prevent you from dominating the field. Also, the end of the game can come in a different way. For example, the game dragged on, no one scored 5 points, and everyone ran out of closed agent tokens. In this case, the one with the most VP simply wins. Actually, this is all that can be said about the rules of the game. Oh yes! Each side of the conflict also has its own unique property that can be used during the game.