Saturday 20 June 2015

Infernal Affairs retheme of Templar Intrigue

When I taught my Taiwanese friends Templar Intrigue (my blog post here), I explained the mechanisms using characters from the Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs (later remade in English as The Departed, which won some Oscars). Templar Intrigue was a Kickstarted game, and I'm not sure whether it is possible to buy it through normal channels. For those who missed it, you may need to make your own copy if you want to try this game. If you like Infernal Affairs, then this retheme which I've made using MS Powerpoint may be of interest. I can't share this on BGG since I don't own the copyrights to the photos I used, which were downloaded from the internet. If you are interested, follow this link.

These are the cards from the original Templar Intrigue. The top row is the Royalist cards (i.e. police force). Starting from the left: card back, the king (the equivalent is Anthony Wong Chau Sang, the superintendent), a monk (policeman), and the Templar archivist (Andy Lau, the mafia mole secretly working in the police force). The bottom row is the Templar cards (i.e. mafia) - the card back, the Grandmaster (Eric Tsang, the mafia boss), a Templar knight (mafia thug) and a traitor (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, undercover cop).

There are four pages in the file I created, and here are two of them.

I put a crown icon on the superintendent card to remind the player who is dealt that card that he needs to reveal his card at the start of the game. One of the cop cards specifies a player number range at the bottom left. This means you only use that card for this specific player number range. This saves some trouble looking up the rules. The mole card has a target icon, meaning he is one of the characters the superintendent needs to hunt down.

The mafia boss card has a target icon too, he's the other character the superintendent needs to identify. There are some disjoints from the movie. In the movie the identity of the mafia boss Eric Tsang is public knowledge. Also the superintendent Anthony Wong knows who the undercover cop is (Tony Leung).

Only 12 cards are needed, and 2 of them are rule summaries, one each (double-sided) in English and Chinese. If you don't need the Chinese one, that's one card less. When I made the Powerpoint file, I miscalculated the dimensions of the cards. You can see that the cards I printed are a few millimeters short. Thankfully they still worked for me and I didn't need to redo the whole thing. My approach was to use a normal playing card as a base. I sandwiched it with a card back and a card face which I printed. Then I sleeve the whole thing with a transparent card sleeve.

These are the two main stars of the movie Infernal Affairs. If you play with 9 or 10, there will be two Tony Leungs.

Everything fits into this small ziplock bag.

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