Gulag Archipelago

If you like extrajudicial surveillance (Counterintelligence), violence (Followed), and detention (The Raft), this deck is for you. Use the vast network of the state's surveillance (Surveillance Team) and detention system (The Raft) to your advantage by terrorizing (Infiltration), surveilling (Informant), interrogating (Interrogation Room), and defeating (Stealth Strike) your enemies, before locking them away.

This is a deck with a heavy dose of theme, but it does function at all player counts. In lower player counts, there can often be too much threat removal, and at higher player counts the deck scales well into thwarting for the group.

The word Gulag is a Russian acronym for the Soviet government agency that supervised the vast network of labour camps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used the word archipelago as a metaphor for the camps, which were scattered through the sea of civil society like a chain of islands extending “from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus.”

The Gulag Archipelago is an exhaustive account based on Solzhenitsyn’s own eight years in Soviet prison camps, on other prisoners’ stories committed to his photographic memory while in detention, and on letters and historical sources.

Where One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a treatise on humanity and simple dignity in the face of unspeakable degradation, Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s cold retelling of systematic human suffering and state terror. The work represents his attempt to compile a literary and historical record of the Soviet regime’s comprehensive but deeply irrational use of terror against its own population.

Dealing damage kills minions, killing minions clears threat, and clearing schemes deals damage. It's an endless, self-sustaining loop of state oppression!

Step 1:

Use your cards to get out what you need: a side scheme (One Way or Another) or a minion (Infiltration). One Way or Another draws you cards to give you more to options, and getting minions out with Infiltration clears threat.

Step 2:

Killing minions clears threat with your static hero ability, Interrogation Room, The Raft, and Stealth Strike. The Raft also locks your enemies in loops of extrajudicial detention that is demoralizing and indefinite.

Your primary ways to deal damage are with Metal Punch, Stealth Strike, and Followed.

Step 3:

Clearing schemes draws you cards with with Skilled Investigator and deals damage with Followed. Clearing schemes also triggers Chance Encounter, which recurs Agent Coulson, Mockingbird, Monica Chang, Hawkeye, or Black Widow.

Coulson gets you a preparation, Monica pulls out more Surveillance Teams, Clint puts damage on minions, and Black Widow gets you an attack event.

Examples:

• Kill one 2-scheme minion with Stealth Strike: remove 2 threat with the event, remove 2 threat with Bucky's hero ability, remove 1 threat from Interrogation Room, and then tuck it in the raft to remove 2 more threat. That's 7 threat removed for killing one minion, and you can split that threat among schemes as needed!
• Pull out a side scheme with One Way or Another to draw cards. Attach Followed and defeat minions to the clear side scheme, which draws a card with Skilled Investigator and then deals damage with Followed to the villain when you clear it!