Hey Sam, thank you for your comments! It's useful to see what folks didn't find clear, or clear enough: we were figuring things out as we wrote it, and had limited time (and word count) to do rewrites and more examples, so we'll try to address all these in a future version. I'm really glad you liked the tone and think it worked, so thanks for that! Also yes, the modular mission structure is a great touch that my co-designer Flavio thought of, and we're eager to expand on it in new versions!
I'm going to answer to a few of your specific questions or points - not as rebuttals (all your criticism is very fair) but just to help outline how the game should work, in case you end up trying it before we do an updated version :)
- In terms of what motivates players, it should indeed be the characters' motivations: I thought of them as player agendas, expressed as in-character roleplaying notes. We can probably emphasize that. It's true there isn't a particular mechanical payoff at this stage, but the game is very light in terms of actual "mechanics" and crunch, so it's a bit difficult to hang things on that. We've been thinking of connecting the motivations to the order in which players pick their epilogue, but I was not super convinced it was thematically spot on. It's a note we have for playtest.
- You're not the first reviewer who raises the role and functioning of the cards, so we probably should have been more clear about that in our writing: essentially, the cards work as tokens, nothing more. You get a card when you Approach or Reveal your own relationships, you spend a card when you Act, or when you Reveal anothers' relationship, lie or motivation. The other thing is, you write the card's rank and suit on a map element, and have to reincorporate that element in your narration when you spend that card to do something. This is a way to keep things a bit tighter in terms of storytelling, and create the tangled webs of secrets and relations that you see in spy novels. We picked cards because we felt they fit the aesthetic more than tokens, because they're common in almost all households, because you can refer individual cards to map elements... and ultimately, because we like cards. There's a version of this game in our heads where secrets are created and revealed by essentially playing blackjack, but the maths for that are convoluted and we didn't think we could figure out something playable by the jam's time frame.
- We didn't want to put a hard time limit on vignettes, despite the need to keep them brief; but we've included a Question that other players can ask to signal "get to a point".
- I agree that some of these interactions are a bit difficult to visualise from just the text. It was certainly difficult to find ways to explain them in writing! Hopefully they'll still be pretty intuitive at the table. I think for a future version I want to write in examples for each procedure, and sharpen the language. Maybe put in some charts.
Thanks again!