The Hanging Room

A Map Game about Spies by Alberto Muti and Flavio Mortarino

Submitted to Mapemound Game Jam 2020

You are spies: planners, field agents, informants. This is the aftermath of an operation. The last few days have been full of tension, hastily encrypted messages and slow, watchful walks to unremarkable locations. Of sudden bursts of fear, and maybe violence. That is all over. 

Now you’re in the in-between. Deep in the bowels of an embassy, a government building, or an unassuming office block, you all wait together in a small space. It’s a room within a room, built of fiberglass and insulating foam and suspended from the floor and ceiling to ensure that no sound escapes. The room is sparse. There’s a table, chairs, and a mechanical clock, with its gears exposed to leave no hiding place for microphones. There’s ashtrays, glasses, bottles of water. 

All of you were involved in the operation, and you are here to go over the events again, one last time, retracing every step, every turn, every cable and dead-drop and gunshot, to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

In a few hours, you will get out. Your report will move up the chain, maybe to disappear forever behind a codename and a need-to-know clearance. You will come out of the hanging room and back to your lives, to disappear again, or to face consequences.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0