Anyone who’s been a nine-to-five office temp will have, at some point, wondered if there was any way of making the endless filing, paper shuffling, typing and office nonsense somehow more exciting. Some of us may have gone as far to wonder if things would be improved by a team of assassins with murder in their eyes.
Temp Worker Assassin is the game that attempts to realise those fantasies. It’s a deck-building worker placement game, which means much of the action is driven by either gathering the right sort of cards or by placing people-shaped tokens (called meeples) on the board. The theme of the game is this: you run a guild of assassins in a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting. You’ve been hired to infiltrate the Bureaucratic Castle (through a five-day temporary contract) and told to take out as many employees as possible. Everyone from the Typing Pool Zombies to the Health and Safety Halflings are for the chop. Staff turnover, it seems, is about to be on the rise.
Sadly, you’re not allowed to bring all your ninja weapons to work, so you’ve got to improvise by using available stationery. This forms the deck-building part of the game. Each card has wonderfully gruesome art from Where’s My Shoggoth author Adam Bolton.
The ‘board’ for the castle itself is made up of a series of cards which are placed in a grid. Each has a cute name such as the Forbidden Stationery Cupboard or the Appalling Admin Department. Each of these rooms has an effect, usually allowing you to loot the stationary supplies for potential weapons. Once you have enough sharpened pencils, staplers and other paraphernalia, it’s time to take on an office worker.
The more monstrous the colleague, the bigger the bounty, and whomever has the biggest pile of gold at the end wins. Many of the cards let you discard a card to pick up more cards, so often you can go in with a weak hand, gambling that it will strengthen as you try to fight the horrid co-worker. The game design is filled with little moments of peril like this; taking risks reaps rewards and picking your moment is key.
The game is currently available for pre-order on Kickstarter until July 28th and we think it’s a great little game for killing time after a stressful day at work or for part of an evening of gaming.
TEMP WORKER ASSASSINS / DESIGNER: DAVID NEWTON / ARTIST: ADAM BOLTON / PUBLISHER: TEMP WORKER ASSASSINS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
