Berlin 1960
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, 'Espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible'. Designed by Flaminia Brasini and Virginio Gigli, and published by Devir, Berlin 1960 is a hidden role deduction game that's set among the spies at work in Germany during the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. It's a team game for 4-8 players where half the players will be CIA agents and half will be agents of the KGB. If you're playing with an odd number of players, nobody looks at the agency card that's left over, so no-one knows which side has more agents but when the roles are revealed at the end of the game, the team that had fewer agents benefits from a compensatory boost to their scoring.
Nobody knows which players are working for the same agency so, as you might expect, a key element of the game is making the deduction of who is working for the other side. This isn't done through mere guesswork: you'll be making your deductions based on other players' actions. When you think you know who the enemy agents are, you write down your deduction and take the top card from the Accusation deck. Tho' it's described as an Accusation, you're not so much denouncing others as placing your suspicions on record: you don't reveal what you've written till the end of the game when players allegiances are declared but the earlier you make your deduction the more points you will earn for your team if your guess is correct. If you make an error tho' you lose your team 2 points.
Each round you'll be playing at least one spy card from your hand of initially five cards. These will let you take the actions set out on the card, but you can always instead play the card to draw two Mission cards from either the CIA or KGB Mission decks or place down Mission cards on either the CIA or KGB side of the board. You might think that drawing from the KGB deck or playing to the KGB track will signal to all the other players that you're obviously working for the KGB. But in a world of spies and counterespionage that would be naive! Players will want to misdirect others and tho' most cards in each agency's Mission deck are specific to that agency, not all are positive, and there are some cards in both decks that will be valid if played to either agency's track...
Berlin 1960 evokes the Cold War era rather well in a 60-minute game. Like Twilight Struggle (GMT), which covers a similar Cold War period, its 'tug of war' scoring adds to the tension. The Mission cards played to each track are revealed and activated at the end of each round. They're shuffled first so it probably won't be obvious who has played which card but the reveals when they come are bound to fuel further suspicion...
The game is at its best at higher player counts (6+) but just be warned that it can be quite a memory challenge keeping a mental note of which Mission decks all the other players have drawn from and/or where they've laid down Mission cards, moreso as you increase the player count.
