I started reading through Mission: Accomplished, a tabletop game about life as a spy back at the office, post mission, but something wasn't gelling with me and the game. It's a neat premise, but the way the game functions didn't do much for me. It's a cool narrative-y game, where a bulk of it is describing how each player did cool or dumb things that affected the mission you reported from. The only thing we know is that the operation was successful (and thus, Capitalism, Military Industrial Complex, etc were saved), and you all survived. Each player writes down how the player on the left helped the mission and how the player on the right jeopardized it, on note cards. These are done in secret, then turned in to Mission Control.
You also at the start, outline the mission as a group, and when introducing your Player Character, you state how you helped the mission succeeded.
The GM (AKA Mission Control) acts like a prompter and helps move the conversation along, trying to put all the note cards into a timeline until you get a completed picture of how the mission played out based on everyone's input earlier. If cards contradict each other, Mission Control tries to get to the bottom of it, and find out which account is the truth.
After the timeline is established, the GM assigns Commendation dice, to agents who upheld the Code (outlined in the book), while giving Citations to those who didn't. So the trick is to scheme with other players to paint someone(s) as the fall people, while trying to finesse the story to make you look good. You also want to avoid Anarchy, which is a GM specific dice. Think of it like a Contempt Token in The Quiet Year. It's a Citation for Everyone, so keep stories straight, and don't get too aggro, otherwise everyone gets punished.
At the end, roll Commendation Dice (white d6s), then Your Citation dice (red d6s), and and for each number on a Citation, remove all Commendation that matches. So if you roll 1 Citation and get a 3, you remove all 3s. Then the GM rolls Anarchy and does the same to everyone.
After that, the GM takes your remaining Commendation dice combination, and sorts everyone's totals with a like... poker mentality? Higher number wins, but duplicates beat singles and so on. Then people get assigned a result based on the final ranking. From last place (Agent deemed a liability) to 1st place (Too Competent for low level missions, taken for special ops training).
2nd place is the sweet spot, you get the promotion, company credit card, nice corner office.
Something about this structure feels really odd to me though.
This wasn't supposed to break into a full on review, just me trying to piece things out on why it didn't vibe with me, even though the premise and such is really really cool. It seems fun in the way Fiasco is fun, so I should like it more. Weird.
Like it's literally Fiasco with extra steps! There are even several potential mission outlines in the back half of the book! Why am I bothered by this?