Spies!
board game
Spies! is a board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1981 that simulates international espionage in Europe in the years leading up to World War II.
Description
Spies! is a game for 2–5 players. Each player represents one of the Great Powers in the 1930s (France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia), and attempts to steal secrets in the period leading up to the start of World War II while protecting their own secrets.
Components
The game box contains:
22" x 34" map of Europe
50 Event tiles
200 die-cut counters
4-page standard rules
4-page Long Game rules
11" x 17" display
Setup
The game board and display are set up with the Year marker on 1933. Each player then:
Chooses a Power. If fewer than five players are present, some of the players take on more than one country.
Takes Event Tiles, draws Action chits and draws 7 random Secrets, placing them facedown on the cities within their territory.
Deploys police in their cities, and places spies facedown in any cities on the map.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Spies!” is board game. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Spies, board and game, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “board game” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q55633697. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1933.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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This entry incorporates text from “Spies!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.