Spy Games
“Before I Kill You, Mister Spy...”
This is the landing page for two excellent spy games, including our second-oldest game and one of our newest. Bad Assassin is a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original Spy Game, featuring some of the same characters in a madcap chase through a cold war city.
A Brand New Spy Game
In the spirit of classic Cheapass Games, we are thrilled to introduce our newest spy game, Bad Assassin. This is the first of several board-only games, although this one also requires one of our generic decks, the Island Deck. If you want, you can even download all the files to print this game yourself.
Bad Assassin is a simple spy-shoots-spy game, where players issue commands to the spies on the board, collecting points for killing spies (or rushing them to safety). You can buy the Bad Assassin board and Spyland Deck separately from our friends at DriveThruCards, and then download the rules directly from us.
Bad Assassin Board at DriveThruCards
Spyland Deck at DriveThruCards
Check out other games with the Island Deck
Along with the pieces above, you’ll need pawns for every spy, plus pencil and paper for every player.
Bad Assassin was the April 2026 reward for our Coconut Crabs. Join that bunch on Patreon, and you can receive our next greatest games while you help keep our lights on!
The Original Spy Game
You’re all super-villains, building fantastical secret lairs to capture the world’s most intrepid spies. Your ultimate goal is to kill them, but you might be tempted to taunt them fist, for extra points.
That’s the premise of Before I Kill You, Mister Spy…, a delightfully silly card game from Cheapass Games. This game is nicely self-contained, so all you need is the deck and the rules.
Spy Game Deck at DriveThruCards
Spy Game Rules PDF (2017)
View the original black-and-white version in our web store
Believe it or not, we’re not done with the Spy Game. We expect to review the rules (but not to redesign the cards) as part of our 2026 Pearl Anniversary series, a showcase of the 1996 games turning 30 years old. Keep watching the skies!
How did we get here?
The original title of the Spy Game included the name of a famous movie hero, because we were young and foolish and did a lot of stuff just to see what would happen. We sold the heck out of that game for seven years, but MGM finally discovered us and sent us the obligatory cease-and-desist.
Our lawyer said “you could probably beat this, but it will cost you more than this game will ever make,” and so we folded immediately. MGM gave us three months to stop selling the game, which meant we could tell our distributors that they had three months to buy us out (this was back when game distributors carried products in warehouses. It was a simpler time.)
They also asked us for damages, setting the bar at “less than a thousand.” We said “four hundred is less than a thousand,” and that was our slap on the wrist, made somewhat softer when we sold a two-year print run in three months.
After the dust settled, we held a contest to rename the game. But we couldn’t use the winner, because it was “What Part of Doctor No Don’t You Understand?”
We reissued the game in a double-deck format, and called it “James Ernest’s Totally Renamed Spy Game.” The hitch with this edition was that we doubled the number of taunt cards, and sort of wrecked the game mechanics in the process. Instead of keeping one card when you see the other one, and knowing it’s safe, you still have two more copies to worry about.
That edition also eventually went out of print, and some years later we brought the game back in its current format, a single-deck game with updated rules. We think it’s the best version yet.
In all of these games, the basic premise is that you lure spies into your lair and kill them, but you always have the option to taunt them and let them escape. In the original versions, they also blow up your lair on the way out, but in this version that doesn’t happen. We sort of miss that part, but we also know it was bad enough just to lose the points. We’re not gonna rewrite the rules again.
If you’d like to see what the game used to look like, and compare it to the version we have now, you can download all the versions for free. Review and enjoy!
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