Decoys - Now With 100% Less Honor!

When I first started showing Decoys to the world, people would ask how they were supposed to keep track of what objective points they captured, or how to prove they actually did so to their opponent. My answer was always 'The Honor System!' even though it didn't address the memory issue. And, rightfully so, a few people were turned off by there being no dedicated game system for tracking your progress.

Enter, the Idle Thumbs forum member, 'Berzee'. He suggested the use of grids in which to track pieces' progress around the board. I liked his idea, so I went ahead and made some new rules that introduce a new mechanic, Score Grids, to eliminate the need for a photographic memory and that pesky honor system.

Enjoy them here! Or, if you already have the core rule-set for Decoys, go ahead and download the addition separately here! And don't forget to save yourself some time by downloading a digital board (without the Score Grids, for now) on your PC here!

I'll spend the rest of this post talking a bit about the creation of the Grids, because I'm like that.

Since the very first match of Decoys, players have been looking for a way to keep track of captured objectives, both their opponents' and their own.

The first solution we came up with was to have players simply make notes to themselves on a piece of paper. This allowed players to keep fresh in their minds any information they deemed important for the duration of the match. And while that more or less solved the memory issue, it did nothing to prevent cheaters from lying if their opponents weren't keeping track of their moves. I like the idea of players keeping notes about whatever they think is necessary, but the rules should mandate the recording of information relevant to the game systems.

The next solution was to have a third person present during a match, like a Referee. Players would tell the Referee which piece was their Spy and which shape was their objective type. Armed with that information, the Ref would be in charge of keeping track of captured objective points for both players. This insured players could not cheat, and if they needed to they could ask the Ref about past moves. The main problem with this solution is it requires a third person. This is already a two player game, I don't want people to have to seek out a third party before getting to play.

I was rather stumped with trying to solve the cheating issue, as any special action taken when a Spy captures an objective point will immediately reveal it as the Spy (since only they can capture objective points). A few weeks ago, I was discussing this very topic over on the Idle Thumbs forums, and that's where Berzee comes in.

He made a post that described the use of 3x3 grids to represent the 9 different objective points, and assigning 1 grid to each game piece. The idea is that when a piece would capture an objective point, you make a mark on its particular grid in the box corresponding to the objective point its on. You do this for both your Spy and your Decoys, even if the piece doesn't actually capture the objective point. And these grids would be on the board itself, in plain view of both players.

This is the perfect solution, in theory. By displaying the potential captures by each piece over the course of the game, it lets players look at their past moves and, in conjunction with the recorded Spy and objective type information, prevents cheating. And beyond that, it should influence players to move more strategically now that the record of all their potential captures is out in the open.

I took his idea and ran with it. You can see how it looks through the links at the top of this post. It looks good, but it still needs to be tested more. And that's where YOU come in! Download those rules! Tell me if you played it! I want to talk to you!

While you're busy playing, I'll be busy working hard on even newer rules! This new set includes some crazy cards that will change the way you think about Decoys, and maybe even your life!

So yeah, look forward to that.