The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents | Hacker News Reader

The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents

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119 pointscoloneltcb28 comments

This doesn't look like Magic: The Gathering at all. More like a board game that uses cards.

I was also kind of surprised at the reference to Love Letter as a card game that has a lot of replay value.

My coworkers and I used to regularly play Coup or Love Letter for a few months on our lunch breaks. I suppose it's not quite as replayable as Coup but we still did keep playing it over that span. I suppose if we had more selection of card games we would've moved on.

> I suppose if we had more selection of card games we would've moved on.

This was the case for me. I keep LL in my bag, because it is quick, easy, and a great way to kill 20 minutes. Coup hasn't worked well with my friend group because we got good at reading one another.

In my experience this is precisely when social deduction games go from good to great. The layers of obfuscation can get pretty deep when your friend knows you know how he would act if you knew what he knew.

Coup is a game of bluffing. If someone guessed accurately what I have, then the next time I would exploit that.

Techdirt is running a Kickstarter campaign for a version of the game that they're developing: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmasnick/cia-collect-it...

The most recent episode of the Techdirt podcast discusses how the project started and gives some ideas about how they’ve approched it and how it works.

Link for reference: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180518/22191239865/techd...

Wasn't that mentioned in the second paragraph of the article?

I can't tell where they're developing that out of (I'm guessing the US, as Michael Masnick is an American). In the US you can't use agency names in such a manner ("CIA: Collect It All"). The Federal Government goes out of their way to stop people from making use of FBI, NSA, CIA, et al. in traditional product & service commercial endeavors (non-media, eg tv shows). It'll be necessary to change that name (Espionage: Collect It All, or something). Just raising that $127,000 on Kickstarter by leveraging the CIA name is enough to get you in trouble with the Feds, they can easily come after that money now.

This looks more like Munchkin. Players who are ostensibly on the same "team" actually spend most of their time trying to undermine each other in the name of getting more successes than their peers.

If you listen to the latest Techdirt podcast where they discuss this game, they actually talk about exactly that: that the game feels somewhat inspired by Munchkin, even if it's not explicitly cited.

The CIA also has a board game focused on the Mafia and Cartels where you capture "El Chapo".

https://kotaku.com/the-cia-made-a-board-game-and-its-now-pla...

Sequel title

"El Chapo: Escape from NY"

Ok now I feel like designing a scenario which includes a CIA card game mastermind. Now retired and living in an obscure villa...with a safe containing the unreleased beta for game version two, "nanobot edition"...

Doesn't seem particularly true to life. Where are the cards for kidnapping innocent people off the streets, keeping them locked in secret prisons, pulverizing their internal organs and torturing them to death?

How do we know that's not in there? After all, they said lots of the original cards were redacted...

Good point! Hopefully the Kickstarter crew will incorporate the "incinerate whole families based on probabilistic guesswork" card in the public release.

I know whether this game is intended to be a recruiting campaign, but if it is it seems like a pretty clever one.

CIA should pivot into making games.

oh they have.. bwhahaha!

Reminds me of the Illuminati Card Game.

I wish uninformed journalists could be bothered to get the terminology right.

A CIA “agent” is a foreign national — a spy. A CIA officer is the American who is “running” the agent.

FBI has Special Agents, CIA has officers.

It’s much like calling a police officer a “police agent.” The reason this bothers me is that it reveals an ignorance of CIA at a fundamental level — if writers can’t even get the basic terminology accurate, how could they possibly be trusted to get the non-trivial aspects correct?

The dictionary definition of "agent" is "a person who acts on behalf of another person or group." Industry terms of art notwithstanding, anyone acting on the CIA's behalf is technically an "agent", in the same way that an employee is an agent of their employer. Similarly, it also means that LEO are agents of their force, if not the government.

Also, it's not a difficult logic leap to call members of the Agency "agents".

Although that would make members of the FBI bureaucrats.

The CIA has spooks.

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