Now, most people familiar with the game may think that new characters are nice, but have little to no impact on the game itself. This new group of characters adds identical twins, a Sikh, a “rocker,” a Mediterranean woman, and a man in a cowboy hat from Mexico.

After its facelift, it’s been adding characters in bunches, with the last bunch bringing along a puppy in a purse and a disabled character. It needs more work, but I think it’ll help people learn how to play.SpyParty, my most anticipated game of 2013 (heh) is still well under development.

It’s really long and in-depth and it still only scratches the surface of the game, and it actually prompted me to add a Beginner Mode to the game to limit the complexity that had to be taught (and learned), 2 but we playtested it a bit at PAX and it successfully taught people how to play the game, and I’ve improved it a lot since then, so I’m pretty happy with it so far. There are a number of small challenges in there to (hopefully) keep it interesting. It walks you through the basic movement mechanics of Sniper and Spy, and then teaches each of the four beginner missions ( Bug Ambassador, Contact Double Agent, Swap Statue, and Seduce Target), first from the Spy side and then from the Sniper side, and then has you put it all together into a full Spy game and Sniper game.

The tutorial uses a mix of text and voice narration, 1 and it tries to get as close as possible to how we train people in-person at PAX, which has worked well for years. After years in Early-Access Beta, with nothing but a four-page manual to help you learn how to play, SpyParty finally has a fully interactive tutorial!

Spyparty gameplay help