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2013 · 1-1 players · 30min · weight 2.19 · 4,455 ratings
port: no portdifficulty: Easy
BGGv4 widev4v4 deep5Sources2Rules cardCandidate0.734Deep dive
Bayes
6.75
Users rated
4,455
Owned
9,639
Wishing
2,327
At a glance — v4 wide
Controlled-vocabulary primitives + 8-axis MDA aesthetic vector. Vocab v1.
Core loop (micro)
Place resistance agents on town spaces to complete missions; dodge patrol routes or lose agents permanently.
MDA aesthetic vector (0–3)
Sensation
0
Fantasy
2
Narrative
2
Challenge
3
Fellowship
0
Discovery
2
Expression
1
Submission
1
Mechanic-interaction primitives (5)
- [3]action_blocking— “Milice collaborators and Wehrmacht soldiers patrol the area; agents who can't make it back are arrested”
- [3]worker_recall_phase— “player places resistance agents on spaces; agents who can't return to safe house are arrested and never seen again”
- [2]escalating_threat— “at the same time Milice collaborators and Wehrmacht soldiers patrol the area”
- [2]variable_setup_per_game— “solitaire worker-placement game with variable goals”
- [1]feeding_pressure— “Agents arrested, never seen again — resource drain forces increasingly difficult choices each round”
discovery_score: 1.995
Archetype fits — v4 deep
How well this game shape maps to mobile archetype templates. Composite is a weighted sum of the 10 fit dimensions.
| Archetype | Composite | LTF | Session | Combo | Arc | Share | 5in | Onboard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balatro Solo worker-placement with a 15-min run and variable mission setup gives a tight session arc, but the loop is action_blocking + worker_recall — no engine_growth or combo_chaining means combo_scaling_depth is shallow vs StS jokers. | 5.40 | 7.0 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 6 | 6 |
| Coop Solitaire-by-design — bluff_info_asymmetry between teammates is absent, no inter-player payoff stacking. Tense escalating_threat would translate to coop tone but the loop has no shared decision surface. | 5.10 | 6.0 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 6 | 5 |
| Cozy Tier table: Worker Placement triggers Open tier (cap 5), but escalating_threat + feeding_pressure primitives push tone explicitly anti-cozy — agents arrested permanently is the opposite of no-fail spatial play. Cap loss_tolerance at 3. | 4.50 | 3.0 | 7 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 6 | 5 |
| Wordle 15-min session is 10x too long for the daily-puzzle slot and the patrol/agent state is too spatial to compress to an emoji grid; mission completion bar could share but won't travel like Wordle squares. | 4.40 | 6.0 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 |
| Snap Solo-only design with no async PvP shape: zero bluff_info_asymmetry against an opponent and no factional card pool. Wrong archetype outright. | 3.60 | 4.0 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 4 |
Translation candidate
Composite fit_score = bayes×0.30 + wish×0.18 + compress×0.17 + difficulty×0.20 + headroom×0.15.
bayes_norm×0.300.274
wish_norm×0.180.730
compress_norm×0.171.000
diff_norm×0.201.000
port_headroom×0.151.000
fit_score (total)0.734= 0.734
Difficulty reasoning
Solitaire by design with deterministic patrol movement; the Print&Play scope makes it a natural mobile candidate.
Closest loop translation
none yet
Rules card
Synthesized from sources below. Readiness: needs-source. Confidence: 0.36.
Readiness
needs-source (confidence=0.36, rules=0.10, fun=0.85). BGG rank: 827; year: 2013; weight: 2.19; playtime: 30 min
| Source | Quality | Role | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
bgg_comments | 0.75 | player voice | positive/player-voice sample |
llm_memory | 0.10 | draft synthesis | sonnet-self-rated-6-unknown |
Core Loop
Engage the Nazi occupation of France in la petite guerre to throw off the yoke of the oppressors and free your homeland!
Maquis is a solitaire worker-placement game with variable goals and a play time of approximately twenty minutes. The player places his resistance agents on spaces around town to achieve his goals - blowing up trains, publishing underground newspapers - but at the same time Milice collaborators and Wehrmacht soldiers patrol the area. Agents who can't make it back to the safe house at the end of the day are arrested, and never seen again.
Turn Structure and State
- No manual/BGA/transcript source is present; card relies on memory plus BGG context.
- BGG description anchor: Engage the Nazi occupation of France in la petite guerre to throw off the yoke of the oppressors and free your homeland! Maquis is a solitaire worker-placement game with variable goals and a play time of approximately twenty minutes. The player places his resistance agents on spaces around town to achieve his goals - blowing up trains, publishing underground newspapers - but at the same time Milice [...]
Win Condition and Arc
Win/scoring arc needs verification from a rules authority.
Decision Primitives
BGG mechanisms: Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Solo / Solitaire Game, Worker Placement
v4 controlled primitives: action_blocking, worker_recall_phase, escalating_threat, variable_setup_per_game, feeding_pressure
Top iOS archetype fits: balatro 5.4, coop 5.1, cozy 4.5.
Why It Is Fun
Fun read needs player-voice synthesis.
Player-voice evidence:
- Very accesible game in terms of rules and price. It can be purchased as app fro a symbolic price while you can print it for free. Very simple rules for the level of decision that delivers. Although with few missions, the levels of...
- After some more plays, I'm getting the idea of how to mitigate the patrols, so I'm enjoying this game a lot more.
- ** Imparato, Scritto e Giocato. Anche in Solitario. Tutorial
- It's a pretty well designed game. Although it is a small game, it contains many conflicts. It is full of excitement and tension. It's also great fun. I loved this a lot. :)
- Playing the PnP version. Looking forward to the reprint. Great game, fast, fun and challenging.
Friction and Failure Modes
- Treat Sonnet-memory edge rules as draft until confirmed by manual, BGA, or transcript.
- Needs at least one stronger rules authority before final extraction use.
Translation and Design Hooks
- Use this card to ask: which primitive carries the fun if theme/licensing is removed?
- For iOS, look for short-session compression, clear state visualization, and a digital-only twist.
- For new tabletop design, look for the tension source and decide whether to preserve or invert it.
Edge Rules and Gotchas
No verified edge-rule section yet.
Sources Used
[
{
"kind": "bgg_comments",
"path": "data/bgg_comments/148729.txt",
"quality": 0.75,
"note": "positive/player-voice sample"
},
{
"kind": "llm_memory",
"path": "data/llm_memory_sonnet/148729.md",
"quality": 0.1,
"note": "sonnet-self-rated-6-unknown"
}
]
Sources (2)
Inputs to rules-card synthesis. Click any pill with ↗ to open the original source.
BGG comments0.75LLM memory0.10
BGG tags
Categories (3)
Print & PlaySpies / Secret AgentsWorld War II
Legacy — v3 deep
Earlier paragraph-form enrichment, kept for reference until v4 deep covers all candidates.
What you do
Each in-game day you place tiny Resistance worker meeples one at a time onto labeled town spaces (Cafe, Print Shop, Train Station, Safehouse, Forest), alternating placements with the occupation: every other placement of yours, you flip a Patrol card and deploy a German soldier or Vichy Milice token onto a spot dictated by the card. After all workers are placed you resolve them in any order — but each worker, after acting, must trace an unbroken road path back to a safehouse through empty or friendly-occupied spaces, or they are arrested and gone for good.
Core loop
Setup: pick a mission card (deliver weapons, blow up a train, publish 3 newspapers, hide a downed airman, etc.) and a difficulty. The clock is 15 days; you must complete 2 missions before the calendar expires or your morale breaks (lose too many workers, the Gestapo pin a tile, lose). Each day: Phase 1 (Placement) — alternate placing your 4-6 workers and flipping patrol cards that deploy occupation pawns; Phase 2 (Action) — activate workers in any order, collecting resources (food, money, weapons, intel) needed for missions, but checking escape paths after each activation; Phase 3 (Upkeep) — clear patrols, advance the day. Mission completion swaps in harder missions. Win: 2 missions completed before calendar/morale ends.
Decision space
Per day the option space is small — typically 5-8 viable placement orders — but the puzzle is high-stakes: you don't know which patrol cards will flip, so every placement is a probability bet about which spaces will be safe to pass through during retreat. The hardest tradeoff is greed vs. retreat: a fourth worker placed deep in town gets you a critical resource but probably can't get home. Mission selection adds a meta-layer (which 2nd mission to pick after completing the first, given current resources). Re-orderable activations create a satisfying real-time puzzle of 'who-goes-first-so-the-path-stays-open'.
Skill expression
Dominant skills: spatial-and-temporal pathfinding under partial information (the Splice between 'I'll know more after the next patrol flips, but I have to commit now'), and risk modeling (which two missions to chase given the patrol-card composition you've seen). Secondary: tile-memory of previously-flipped patrol locations to predict density. Tertiary: resource budgeting across the 15-day arc. No opponent-reading, no math beyond simple counting. Strong players treat the day as a constraint-satisfaction puzzle and chronically leave one worker as a 'rescue' option to clear blocked paths.
Tactile dependency
low — Print-and-play roots — a paper map, cardboard pawns, simple cards. Every game state is fully legible; pathfinding logic is graph traversal, exactly the kind of puzzle a touchscreen can visualize better than the table can. The atmospheric weight comes from theme and tension, not from the components themselves.
Closest mobile genre
puzzle/zen
Live-service potential
low
Digital meta-layer ideas
- Roguelite campaign: 8-mission narrative chain across 1942-1944, each mission is one Maquis town, persistent agent roster (named characters who can die permanently), unlockable difficulty modifiers — the perma-loss mechanic is already in the tabletop game and fits roguelike DNA precisely
- Daily seeded puzzle: same map, same patrol deck order for everyone that day, leaderboard by missions completed and agents-saved
- Asymmetric 1v1: one player is the Resistance, one player programs patrol movement — same core game, async-PvP'd
- Branching narrative campaign with permanent town-state changes (a destroyed bridge stays destroyed across runs) — leans into the historical-storytelling angle