"Ecks" is is a true game of espionage, assasinations, and influencing the world within. Players act as the D-Ops (Directors of Operations) of intelligence agencies of the world's most powerful nations. Directors build their team of Operatives (special agents) and use them to outsmart their opposites.
The board of Ecks is made up of a set of large-hexes each with a map of either a major city or an important territory. The hexes can be set up in any fashion, edge-to-edge or a gap to indicate a sea in between. Each set of cities and territories are designated as parts for each nation in the game (locations are subject to change nations at any point in the game).
Each city is split into districts and territories into regions, along with having various roads and special locations such as airports and seaports displayed.
Also on the board are markers: one set mark clandestine locations that the directors will use, such as headquarters, overseas statations, safehouses, etc; the second set represent people scattered all about - some of these may represent operatives...at one point in time or another (more on these later).
Each player will have a blinder in front of them to hide all sensitive information from other players. There, they will have cards displaying their clandestine locations, operatives, and actions. Each operative will also have one or more* passport cards attached, equipment cards, and a counter that corresponds to a marker on the board (as forementioned).
Each and every marker on the board is marked with a unique alphanumeric character that matches counters with the same unique characters. Any operatives in play (behind the blinders) will have one of these counters on their card, and the rest of the counters are kept hidden in a bag. The markers that correspond to the counters with the operatives indicate the operative's real world location on the board. The rest of the markers with their counters in the bag represent random ordinary people.
Movement happens each turn with a player grabbing a certain number (not yet determined) of counters from the bag. The number of counters will determine how many moves they can make. Matching the counters and counters on operatives to their respective markers, the player can only move those select markers.
If at anytime two different markers are in the same position, one corresponding to an operative, a player can swap an operative's counter is replaced with the other respective counter, giving the operative a new identity as the other marker. The swap counts as a movement action. A marker cannot be moved if its counter was swapped the same turn and a counter cannot swap if its marker had moved the same turn.
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[HISTORY]
So this idea harkens back to my late highschool days when I was fed up with Risk and trying to modify it. Basically I was making Risk-clones *facepalm*. However, somewhere along the lines I finally started coming up with original ideas and a game called "[!]" (try whispering that), which eventually got the title "Projeckt Ecks" when I became enthralled with the history of the Cold War, but it was still a little bit Risk-y. Fast forward a few more years and I started actively looking for more Cold War espionage sources of inspiration and happened upon an old BBC spy-drama called "The Sandbaggers". After watching every episode available on Youtube and buying the complete series and watching the rest, I started to formulate an idea for a spy game. However, there was absolutely no real game mechanics to realise that idea, and in turn the idea got shelfed.
Present day, I discovered BoardGameGeek.com and decided to look up for a spy game that already existed. Reality was, (in my perspective) there really weren't any "spy games", only spy-themed games or clones of other games with 007 slapped on them. That really disappointed me. It doesn't mean all of them are bad games, I just played the new KickStarter game "The Agents" the other night, and think it's a great solid game, it's just when I looked at it, you could remove the spy-theme and give it any other theme or no theme at all and essentially wouldn't change the game mechanics-wise.
However, that set my neurons on fire! Next morning I finally had breakthroughs for game mechanics and started writing them down as they came...
Finally, after about 7 years, Projekt Ecks has finally started...