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SpyParty is a spy game about human behavior, performance, perception, and deception. While most espionage games have you spend your time shooting stuff, blowing stuff up, and driving fast, SpyParty has you hide in plain sight, deceive your opponent, and detect subtle behavioral tells to achieve your objectives.
Unlike the suave and confident spies you might find in films or books, most spies in spy games are more like super powered commandos--more Rambo than James Bond. By contrast, SpyParty is a new and quite different game about the more interesting and deeper aspects of being a spy.
In Challenger the last perfect season in SCL fell, as plastikqs played spoiler to c9high, winning 7-3. mastrblastr bounced back from consecutive losses after a 3-0 start to narrowly defeat fancypants 7-5. And dowsey won his third straight, beating bitbandingpig 7-5. bitbandingpig opened 4-0 but has dropped matches to c9high and dowsey respectively, as Challenger sharpens its field. The top five players are all within one point of each other, and nine more are within two of that group.
As SCL Season 4 reaches its halfway point, wodar and warningtrack analyze the standings and discuss what might happen in the second half:
In Challenger incnone suffered his first loss, at the hands of plastikqs (casted here), and c9high‘s scored a stunning 7-2 win over previously perfect bitbandingpig, leaving him in the only 5-0 player in the entire SCL. plastikqs and waterhouse, are right behind him at 4-0-1. dowsey defeated doomedbunnies 7-4 despite the following:
In Challenger bitbandingpig, who had yet allow an opponent to get to even five wins, fell behind 3-5 against the also-undefeated masterblastr before winning the final four games in an intense casted set. dowsey won 7-2 over bayushi, incnone scored a lopsided 7-1 victory over doomedbunnies, and c9high defeafted amlabella 7-3. bitbandingpig, c9high, and incnone are the only three perfect (4-0) players left in Challenger, but three others are still undefeated (3-0-1), and five more are just two points back.
In Challenger nearly all the 2-0 players from last week won again, and won easily: bitbandingpig won 7-1, quicklime won 7-2, and sheph won 7-3. The exception was the hotly anticipated dowsey–incnone matchup, with both players coming in undefeated. incnone won a tight (casted) set, 7-5, in what could end up being a finals preview. And zerdoom jumped out to a 6-3 lead on basshead before the latter won the last three to force a tie (analyzed on the EU cast).
Full context: from Sunday’s NA cast of the slappydavis-drawnonward Platinum Week 2 match.
Challenger continues to be a roiling mess of activity, but after two weeks 12 players are 2-0. Keep an eye on incnone, who’s not only undefeated, but scored a shutout this week and is now 14-3 in two matches.
The players in Challenger are off and running. As of the time of this writing, 27 of the 32 matchups have been played. It’ll be a few weeks until the contenders emerge from the chaos, but early stand outs among the week 1 winners include dowsey, who’s amassed over 2,700 games in under a month, and c9high, who’s played nearly 4,000 in about five weeks. Keep an eye on davidw, too, and expect a few other names to emerge by the end of May as Challenger’s Swiss-style schedule gradually.
For five years, I’ve been keeping a secret.
Keeping a secret is always a little fun. You get to feel special. You get the satisfaction of knowing something interesting that other people don’t. In discovering the Next Big Thing while it’s still Next and not yet Big. But it’s not sustainable, because a bigger, better part of you wants to share it. The fun of a secret lies in knowing you’ll get to reveal it someday.
Today is that day.
A couple of years ago, I flew to Seattle to volunteer at the SpyParty booth for PAX West. Afterwards, I wrote an essay about the game and its community called Shaking the Hand of Someone You’ve Shot, in which I said the following:
“…this game of bite-sized espionage is too strange and refreshing to merely enjoy: it has to be shared.”
This idea is partly literal: SpyParty is a multiplayer game, after all. Every game is different, and every game is shared with someone else. It is, to use a word you’ll almost never see in video game writing, intimate. Does intimacy scale?
That’s the test, both for the game itself and the community: what happens when a close-knit group, where everyone knows each other, opens its doors to the rest of the world.
Today, SpyParty will be on Steam. We don’t know what happens next, we just know that it’s next. The secret is out. Tell everyone.
Join the party.