zerotka and I played it a bunch with internal builds, but I decided to try going straight to the finished art version for the public release. Unlike previous new art maps, this time I didn’t release the ugly prototype version for public playtest. This build was actually a bit of an experiment with the beta process as well. I figured, if Holmes gets a pub named after him in London (you can see it in the reference images above), Irene can have one too! An Experiment It turns out Carole Nelson Douglas wrote some fun books from Irene’s point of view, so we’ve been reading those too. My daughter and I are currently reading our way through the Complete Sherlock Holmes, and Irene Adler is an interesting character in one of the stories, A Scandal in Bohemia. Some have asked about the name of the pub, The Irene Adler. Time will tell how these pan out and if they help Spies not get shot in doorways. The other major gameplay change is some pathing and movement tuning to hopefully eliminate some of the “hard tells” associated with trying to move through congested areas. SpyParty beta testers have even figured out that you can use the delegation to force the Ambassador to go to the bar, so you can get a fingerprint from the drinks later! It’s a good test for the upcoming “recommendations” feature I want to add. If you delegate, the NPC goes to order a drink and steal the list, so the Sniper has to think back to who was in which conversation and when and with whom, which adds a significant layer of subtlety to the mission. You can either pick it up yourself, or choose to delegate the pickup to another guest by going into a conversation. Before, the guestlist would be on Toby’s tray, and you’d steal it (or have somebody else steal it if you got a “green Action Test”) when he served you a drink. This also means the Purloin Guestlist mission completely changes on this map. There’s no waiter on Pub, only the bartender, so to get a drink, you need to go to the bar and order it.