Spy x Family: Mission for Peanuts Review

11.10.2023 - 16:13 / boardgamequest.com

We reivew Spy X Family, a card game based on the tv show of the same name. Spy X Family is a Love Letter style game where players are secretly trying to get the three main cards in their hand.

Not familiar with the anime series Spy x Family? Well, you should seek it out. It’s a wholesome story about a family that learns to embrace their strengths together. Sure, there’s some violence and some unfortunate anime tropes that sneak in on occasion, but daughter Anya Forger’s adorable outbursts and telepathic powers are the glue that holds it all together.

It’s great to see the show getting a card game. It has been given the Love Letter treatment and quite a lot of the thematic elements tie in nicely with the system’s mechanisms. It plays from three to five players, is designed by Anthony Thorp, and was provided to us by publisher Kess. Is there enough here to entice those unfamiliar with the anime?

If you’re familiar with Love Letter this is an easy teach. Players try to gain all three family members—Loid the Spy, Yor the Assassin, and Anya the Telepath. Each player begins with two cards and chooses one as their role. There are eight roles in total, each featuring a character from the anime. The prized card is the Spy as there is only one of them in the deck. Players work to discover this card either by drawing or trading cards with others.

On their turn, players draw a card and choose from one of two actions. They either replace their current role with a new role and trigger the card’s Deploy action, or they discard a card to use its Assist action. Deploy actions can be either active or passive. Anya, for instance, has a Deploy passive that prevents the player from being eliminated by the Assassin. The Seer’s Assist action is active and allows players to draw up to two cards and then put that many on the bottom of the deck.

The Assist actions can shake up the game. They may allow players to adjust roles or hands of cards. The Secret Police Assist action is all about targeting a player who they think has the Spy card. If correct, the player with the Spy is eliminated. And then there is the Assassin. This card eliminates any player if it ends up in their hand in any way other than drawing it.

Play continues until one of three things happens: a player gains all three family members (Spy, Assassin, Telepath) into their hand and display, all other players are eliminated, or determining the best pair of cards in hand when the deck runs out. Peanuts (Anya’s favorite food) are points and the player with two peanuts wins the game (three peanuts in a three-player game).

It may take a moment for all players at the table to get a handle on the flow of the game. Each card has two options based on how you decide to