But no, here's a game centered around a very real thing in our world. The CIA. Let's just get one thing straight right from the get go...this box is hideous. The artwork is so ugly, and the almost baby puke green color is an awful choice. Usually a board games box is often better than the game itself, but for once, we have the opposite situation here. This might in fact be the worst box I've covered thusfar on this blog, and that's saying something, cause while we haven't had any I've outright disliked, we sure have had some that have come close to being stinkers. Town Dump immediately comes to mind, which looks so laughably weird that it almost looks like a fictional board game you'd seen in another piece of media.
This game, published by Waddingtons and made by House of Games which is a Canadian based company, was released in 1973, back when people still sort of had at least meager respect for the government agencies, or at least abject terror masquerading as meager respect. Designed by Earl Doherty who also designed the games Face Off and Land Grab - both of which I'll add to the list to cover at some point - the game runs for 60 minutes and the description of the game reads as thus:
In "Project CIA: the secret formula", 17 envelopes are scattered in designated spots on the board game. One of the 17 envelopes has the secret formula. By rolling the dice, players move around the board game and as they pass over the positions where the envelopes are, they pick up the tile and see if it has the secret formula printed on the bottom of the tile. The winner of the game is the one that exits the board game from one of its four entrance/exit gates. There is a clear moving piece representing a security guard that moves around from one room to another room. If a player finds himself inside a room with the security guard, he/she has one turn to exit the room.
The interesting thing about this game is that it's actually part of a two piece game, the other half being called "Project KGB: The Double Agent", and while the two board games are distinct, different, and have different rules, they can in fact be united together and played following the instructions as "Super KGB", which sounds like a punk band from the mid 90s, but sadly isn't.
Even the board is as generic as it comes, which kind of caught me off guard. I mean, from the way the box art is designed, I half expected this to be a pop up game, but it isn't. It's a flat 2d board, with no pieces, and even the player tokens are all a generic shape and color that resemble more than anything the tokens found in Trouble. The whole thing just reeks of plainness.
And frankly I'm not even sure why I'm that surprised, because what could you really do here? Aside from making an offshoot of Clue or something, what could this really be? I mean, it's not like you're actually infiltrating anything, it's not like you're actually solving some kind of mystery, so what are you even doing?
The whole thing stinks, and that's what stinks the most is that it stinks.
It's a shame too. I really thought there could be something here worth being even remotely excited about, and like I said, while the idea of combining sister games and creating one large game from it is definitely interesting and nobody can deny that, that doesn't save it. They're still bland and uninspired. Putting them together is simply going to make it even bigger, not less boring. The grid design on the board is kind of cool, I'll admit, but that doesn't save it. Okay, the game came out in 1973, yes, it's quite old, but that's not really an excuse. There's plenty of stuff from before that and the same time as it that did things far more visually appealing and intellectually stimulating. These just didn't even seem to try.
I'm kind of sad that we wrapped up this month with suck a stinker, and especially sad that this thing had to follow the previous weeks game, Mr. Ree!, which was arguably a FAR more compelling spy type concept than this could ever hope to be. But this is what a lot of industries, especially toy industries, were back then. Yes we got a lot of quality creations - some might even say the amount of quality we saw output was staggering, considering - but we were also given far more either generic or outright bad creations to boot. Everyone was simply trying to outperform one another, monetarily speaking, and as a result the consumer was gifted a litany of meagerly inspired half assed attempts at legitimacy.
I'm sad to say that the Project CIA and Project KGB board games are definitely part of that era.
But that's not too surprising, is it? I mean, after all, the government's always letting us down.
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