An Intelligence Training Tool - and a fun game!

Did you know that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) uses games to train its analysts? Let's talk about that!

Today, I'm continuing to discuss intelligence techniques, but I'm doing so by looking at a card game called "Collect It All". This game was developed by a CIA intelligence analyst named David Clopper, and was used to teach new recruits at the agency about collection techniques. Originally it was classified "Top Secret", but (after some redactions) it was released into the public domain.

The game can be played in one of two ways - cooperational or confrontational. In confrontational play, the players are different intelligence teams or groups competing with each other, while in coop play they are all on the same team.

There are several kinds of cards in the game, divided into two decks: the crisis deck and the collection deck.

The crisis deck includes a number of possible crises that the players have to avert by gathering enough intelligence based on the difficulty of the card representing that crisis. Every crisis card has a difficulty rating between 1 and 9, as well as symbols indicating which of the intelligence aspects (political, military, economic, and/or weapons) the crisis involves. Each crisis also has a point value between 1 and 3, indicated by dots in the top-right corner of the card - these are used in confrontational play, as the first play to resolve ten points of crises wins.

The crisis deck with a few of its cards.

The collection deck has three kinds of cards: technique cards (divided into HUMINT, GEOINT, MASINT, SIGINT, and OSINT), "Reality Check" cards which can help or block a technique card, and "Resolution/Manager Challenge" cards - the resolution aspect of these cards is used in cooperative play to determine if a crisis was resolved successfully, and the manager challenge aspect can be used in an advanced form of confrontational play to force the player to explain how the technique actually applies. (These latter cards are removed for a simpler confrontational-play game.)

Reality Check cards can help or block a technique

Resolution/Manager Challenge cards

Basically, you use technique cards to gather information about a crisis, provided that a) the range of the technique is at least as high as the difficulty of the challenge, and b) the technique card matches at least one of the intelligence aspects of the crisis (political, military, economic, and/or weapons, as stated before). The difficulty of the crisis determines how many successful techniques are needed to defuse that crisis, so for a three-point crisis card you'll need to play three techniques that aren't countered by Reality Checks. If you play a technique on a crisis successfully, but it's not enough to defuse the crisis, then it stays "in play" until additional techniques are played to reach the challenge's difficulty. This means that, during confrontational play, another player could steal the crisis that you'd only partially solved on your turn.

A selection of technique cards

You can download the original (heavily-redacted) materials released by the CIA here (PDF, 104 pages), or there are vendors online that sell games based on it, such as my version which came from Techdirt and Diagetic Games. And if you want a peek at some of the other games the CIA has developed and used as teaching tools, this article is pretty interesting.