Just a total mess of a ruleset. Grab a die for this a die for that and a die for something else. If you have no something else then the GM will give you a sympathy die. Just so convoluted and not needed when their are so much simpler game systems that work much better. It would have been so much better to modify d20 or 5e and go from there. I love Top Secret the original (despite it also being clunky). I wouldn't buy this one again, but I do think the adventure modules are good plots.

Any game over 40 pages or so that doesn't have bookmarks will never get more than 2 stars from me. The rules themselves seem pretty solid, but I'd never run it without a good way to quickly reference rules sections.

I was excited to Kickstart this new edition of one of my favorite classic RPGs. The crew of designers put together a thoughtful game system with the Lucky 13 Core mechanic. There is a solid amount of work in here updating the Tradecraft Skills to the modern age. THe book has an odd amount of pages dedicated to gear and things that don't have practical value and there are certainly parts that feel unfinished. Overall, I do recommend this system as its a solid update to a great game in my favorite genre of role playing

A very nicely done product, obviously a labor of love for the original author and his supporters. The mechanics are very similar to Savage Worlds, and thus is useful if you are a fan of that system (as I am). The only downside in this rather nice work is it has zero connection to either the classic Top Secret nor Top Secret/S.I.

And that is precisely where it falls apart. I love simple percentile-based games (see Covert Ops by DWD Studios which is an homage to Top Secret) and while the original Top Secret had a rather horrifically convoltued combat system (which we ignore when we played as kids), it otherwise was fairly easy to use. More importantly, I wanted to be able to use Top Secret New World Order to run all those classic Top Secret modules. At the very least, the authors should have included some notes on conversions for both 1st Edition and S.I. modules. Without that, this product tries to capitalize on nostalgia without delivering it.

What is really missing is the deep, thoughtful writing in some parts and the gee fun attitude on others of the original games. The appendix of 1E Top Secret was a masterpiece - which tons of detailed explanations of spy terms and various spy agencies around in the 1980s. Add in the cool mission generator and reward charts for random fun, and well ... wow. The old Top Secret Companion with its alignment system based on political belief, in-game eductional oppotrunities for PCs, and tons of info on travel times, border security, and more ... just wow. That's the kind of meat and potatoes needed. Older-school games set in the real world tried to do this to help players and GMs really get into those worlds. For example, TSR's Gangbusters did a helluva good job explaining how the various law enforces worked, what thier powers were, or how reporters files stores, or how crooks made money. Genius stuff.

What I miss in this also are short snippet examples of play, with a fun lively tone. See old Star Frontiers and Gangbusters for examples of this. Help new players really get into the tone, theme, and mood of silly spy action heroics. And no, there will never be a "realistic" spy game because in the real world, espionage is deadly-dull, bureaucratic, paper-shuffling, bribery and (rarely) seduction work that takes years to pull off a mission. Not the stuff of your average spy movie.

Is this new system good? For sure, it has a lot to be said for it. There was a lot of exellent work put into this. I just think Merle and friends need to reach out to Wizards and at least get a gentlemen's agreement to have some conversion notes placed in a future NWO product. That way, the new TSR wins and WOTC wins and most importantly, the player base wins.

Go back, hash it out, and bring all those great modules back to life. In the meantime, I will use my conversion of Top Secret to Savage Worlds to run 1E, S.I., and NWO adventures - many of which are excellent.

Post-thought: As of writing this (June 2021), I am sick to death of new systems. Sick of it. There are tens of thousands of new systems, with many heartbreakers. Why in God's name cannot authors simply stick with a percentile roll-under or a 2d6 roll over mechanic. Super-simple, tried-and-true for 30 years. Keep the damn mechanics simple, and then layer on levels of (optional) detail, fun twists, and more. But keep 90% of your book about the narrative world of the genre - how people live, work, eat, play. How the factions and good guys and bad guys work. A random adventure generator. A basic campaign for beginning GMs to riff off. This could apply to ANY genre. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Stop with weird dice with odd symbols. Pay to licenses into an existing system and go with that. Or as I said a generic percentile simple die-roll - which are not IP. FFS, give us worlds not new systems to learn!

If you are looking for a spy game, this is it. It is a simple book that is designed to allow a game to be run in short order. I will say that based on the book, while it is possible to run a team, it seems best suited for individual agents (a one-on-one game).

My group and I have played the game quite a few times now. Our overall consensus is that is a fun game, but a few of the rules are wonky. There is an erratta, and it cleared a few things. We still had to make our own tweaks. The review is based off of the box set.

The Lucky 13 system made it super easy to pick up. The tension track is great. Tension builds up during missions and it effects the difficulty of skill checks.

Combat could be a little diffuclt to track, compared to other systems. It's similar to the original XCOM DOS games, once I realized that, it made it easier.

Skills are split into multiple proficiencies, and then you level up each proficiencies individually. I like the system, but a few of the proficiencies don't seem like they belong to the skill they are under.

Rule book: The rule book could have been better organized. For example, it talks about action points and combat, switches to the rules for hacking, surviellance, and a few other topics, before returning to combat rules. The art work is a throw back to the style of older RPG books. One of my favorite parts of the rule book, is the end. The game doesn't have many guns built into it, but there is an excellent system to put almost any gun into the game.

Character creation: Like most games it has the two basic methods: rolling for it, and an array. Rolling for attributes can leave some really hit or miss characters. I had one person roll the worst character possible, and another player rolled the best character possible. I highly reconmend the array methods.

Character sheet:It's one of the better sheets I've seen, but could use a few quality of life aspects. One, of those would be a spot to write what the combat roll would be with certain weapons.

Overall: We had a great time with it. There were a few hickups in the begining, but everything smoothed out in the end.

I backed the KickStarter for this edition of Top Secret and having been a fan of the previous editions I really wanted to like this one but sadly it really fell short for me.

First up I need to say if you are familiar with the previous editions of the game this edition is Top Secret in name only. It really doesn't feel connected either mechanically or thematically to previous iterations in any way.

At it's core the game system is functional but due to some (in my opinion) confusing layout and writting it takes a while to pick it up. My group played about 4-5 sessions before certain game concepts started making sense to us. The lack of flavour text and minimal use of art also meant for me the game felt very generic and dry. For some people this will be a non-issue as their intent will be to use this against a modern 'real-world' backdrop and they won't really want any finctionalized inserts but for me it felt diminished.

Overall I wouldn't truly call the game "bad" but if you have a previous version of Top Secret or any kind of a D20 modern spy game it really doesn't feel like there's any real value for money here.

Terrible rulebook. It is a horrible mess of half baked rules awful decisions and it stands as one of the ugliest book I have recently bought. Biggest regret in a while.

I thank Merle Rasmussen for giving us Top Secret way back when. He provided my friends and me with countless hours of pleasure, escape, and happiness.

I am also grateful that Rasmussen stuck with the game and provided many excellent Top Secret additions in Dragon Magazine.

This incarnation of the game is a sad, chaotic mess. The mechanics are not just clunky, but archaic compared to other games. The editing is inconsistent.

The spirit of adventure, fun, and 'gee whiz' which made us want to play the original Top Secret over and over, seems missing here.

There's just not anything in the new edition which makes my friends and me want to play the game.

I'm glad I bought it, to see and compare, and to support Rasmussen. But if I saw this game in a store, and had a chance to look through it, I definitely would not buy it.

Top Secret / New World Order neither breathes life into an old gem, nor gives us anything new worth digging in to.

Core system is fine and overall concept/theme is good. However, rulebook is a convoluted mess. Support for game has been atrocious (lack of errata, lack of replacement of missing tables, things promised and not delivered) has been terrible as well. Really want to like this game, but not sure designers have any idea how to deliver a quality product.

I am a backer of the original KS and should have known. As soon as they said they did not want to share the PDF early with their backers so everyone could experience the "new gamebox" feeling unspoiled all my alarm bells should have gone off. Pretty much all of the problems with the game are very obvious on first read through and would have been found and commented on by backers if they would have had early access. That would not have been a guarantee they would have changed anything but at least they would have tried.

As other reviews have already said, the dice system is a bit of a mess with 3 ways of adjusting for difficulty and absolutely no guidance whatsoever on when to use what. The dice system has almost some narrative feel to it with the assembly of the dice pool from various sources and is not all bad. At other times though it is too precise. A choice example: To land safely with a parachute requires 6 separate rolls. Each step can fail and will result in you either getting damage or drifting off target. 6. To simply land safely with a parachute. Thats around 5 rolls too much for my taste.

There is a pretty bland table of phobias to roll on for your character but not really any rules that say when. Not to mention it is handled with no sensitivity towards the subject at all. It is just a list of 100 phobia types. There is also a section on how to add your own weapon types and that goes into weird math like “A 9mm round has 393 ft/lb of muzzle energy. 393/20 = 19,65. Rounded up to 20 that results in 2d10 Damage” instead of just listing a table with common calibers and relating damage. Not to mention missing tables, bad examples and absolutely no GM section at all. From the guys who were involved in the original Top Secret I actually expected a masterclass in “How to run spy games”. It feels like a rush job without the proper care many smaller publisher give their products.

And finally the art is mediocre with just a very few good pieces and some pieces veering into the bad. They collected over 100,000 USD for this game, I seriously wonder where that money went. Overall a disappointing release.

I backed the KS for this, and downloaded the PDF, I believe, on the day it came out. I also received the boxed set. I like the physical contents of the box and the box itself; I like that I have vehicle cards for chases; and the erasable character cards look like great tools for convention play. I like the counters, too, and can easily imagine a tabletop arrangement with a consistent look of red and black, counter representing cards racing through city streets, all supporting espionage adventures.

And then I read the rules and tried to make sense of them.

I think presentation of the rules suffers from two major issues, both of which greatly inhibited my ability to understand them and to imagine how they'd work at the table. First, they are really poorly organized. The core mechanic, or that which passes for it, isn't fully explained until about halfway through the book, well after the too-long character generation section, meaning that when reading it cover to cover, by the time you're deep in the chargen weeds you still really don't know how the stats and skills and such actually work. Other reviewers have pointed out missing tables and 'dead references,' and there are those, too, but my bigger issue was in how the rules were laid out: they are chopped into pieces and spread throughout the book, making it hard to conceptualize the game as a whole, and I've read the book alomst twice already.

The other major issue with the rules is the lack of examples. There are a number of examples of rules in play, as is common in games over the last decade plus, but the writers were really inconsistent in which rules they decided to explain through examples, providing them for what I considered to be the easy, obvious stuff, but not doing so when it would have been really helpful.

Beyond the presentation of the rules, I am not thrilled with the rules themselves. I like the idea of "Lucky 13" as a core mechanic, of sorts, but the reality is that there isn't a core mechanic - not in the sense of what you'd find in WOD or d20 or 2d20 or Savage Worlds. Most times you roll an attribute die + skill die + maybe something else die (for equipment used or a GM deciding to give you a boost...but there's no real explanation for why or how the GM would do this), and meet or beat 13. Sounds simple, right? But wait...sometimes it's not 13...sometimes it's higher, and can increase based on player dice failures (yes, you read that correctly: when the dice are not friendly, the game gets mechanically harder by raising the baseline difficulty for everything). And sometimes the GM can shift your dice up or down a type - as in, you have a d8 for a skill but because of the situation you get downgraded to a d6. And remember that third die? Well, if you have an "asset," like a good weapon or something like that, it'll have a die rating to use (and there's virtually no guidance on how to decide what these ratings should be on things outside of the book), and you add that to your pool. If you lack an asset, the GM can opt to give you a "Decision Die," which is bigger for easier tasks and smaller, down to d4, for harder tasks. Your GM might decide to give you this, or not. And so if you have a d6 for a stat (average) and a good skill (d8) and no asset, and your GM decides to not give you a Decision Die...good luck rolling 13 or 14 on d6+d8.

Thus, there are three different ways to adjust task difficulty: change the types of dice to be rolled, change the number of dice to be rolled, or change the target number to be meet or beat. That's not a core mechanic: that's a grab-bag of different probabilities, with no guidnace in the book as to how and when to use them gracefully. Note: there is no GM section at all.

Beyond the lack of a coheremt core mechanic (how very 80s of the designers), there are multiple crunchy subsystems for car chases, underwater fighting, underwater shooting, and so on. Through these there is a clear simulationist thread shot through the game, with an unncessary amount of complexity - coupled with few and inconsistent examples - adding nothing that seems enjoyable to the play experience.

I have no idea whom the designers worked with as they edited and revised the game outside their circle, but this smacks of a rush job, with many rough edges...essentially this feels like a Beta test rather than a finished product. I've no idea and I will not conjecture as to why there is no GM's section, zero setting information (zero aside from mentioning the shadowy "ICON" for which everyone works), few examples of rules in action, and missing tables and referenced content.

I'm disappointed, really, because I was looking forward to this and assumed that it would be a reboot that took into account the developments in rules systems over the decades, and would faithfully stick to balance point between gritty espionage and Bond-style action that the original two games sought to maintain. I'm not sure what kind of a game, in terms of story, this seeks to be, as it's just a book and box full of rules. And I'm not sure how this game will operate at the table because I'm still trying to figure out how the system works.

Although I would have been frustrated by a delay, I'd rather have been told that the game was going to take another few months to get right, instead of getting this, which offers a lot of potential but comes up really short.

I've only given this a cursory glance through, so take my review with a grain of salt...

I was really excited to see an updated Top Secret game, as I had heard the original was pretty interesting. Unfortunately, a number of issues seem to plague the game and book.

Pros: A lot of interesting ideas. Discussion of movement and combat, vehicles, underwater fighting, etc. There's a lot of good base material here to work with. And lots of interesting examples of weapons, gadgets, and tools.

Cons: Because of the complexity, there are a lot of mechanics to cover those different tasks. There are things missing within the book. The text refers to tables that don't exist. Certain sections give only vague or high-level information about how things work. The book has really wide margins, though some of the artwork pushes into those margins. No idea why that is... And seriously... in this day and age, a PDF document that not only has no links in the Table-of-Contents you can just click on to go to that section of the book, but also bookmarks that have typos and zero consistency of capitalization or order. (Some first words of the bookmarks are caps, some bookmarks have all words in caps, some have no words in caps, some have all first letters in caps, some have a mix of first letters in caps and some in non-caps... seriously, who typed this??? Also, most are in alphabetical order, but some are not. Why???) Artwork also feels inconsistent. While it has a similar style, you can definitely tell art pieces were drawn by different artists. Some feel cleaner and more comic book-like, while others feel a bit more hand-sketchy, and others still are just simple silhouettes of objects or people. Overall, the book layout and art could be vastly improved.

Not really a con or a pro, but as another reviewer mentioned, the mechanics feel a little Savage Worlds-y. Bumping up or down the die size to adjust difficulty based on circumstances, tools, and skills, and rolling to always hit a specific target number: 13. May be good or bad, depending on your feelings for the Savage Worlds system.

Overall, I really love the idea of an espionage RPG. And I wanted to love Top Secret NWO so badly! But, things feel a bit rushed and incomplete. Considering I only paid the $10 for the PDF backer level, I feel I got plenty for my money. I'll likely be able to make some adjustments, either beforehand or on-the-fly, and run some test scenarios for some friends. But, had I gotten in on a physical copy, I have a feeling some disappointment would have been had.

TL;DR: Good bones, poor editing, feels rushed.

All in all, a fairly disappointing product. And that makes me sad, because I was and am so excited.

The dice system seems interesting off the bat: it is small, and feels quick. Dice for a stat, for a skill, for a piece of gear, and try and beat the number 13. Feels perfect for pulse-pounding spy action! Exactly what I want! Very quickly, however, the wheels come off.

No guidelines are given for how to rate the gear that you are using: nothing about what separates a d4 parachute from a d8 parachute, or if there is a difference, or how to adjudicate permitting or denying either of them.

If you don't have any gear, the text has an answer: assign a die to the player to represent the difficulty of the task at hand, with the option to give them no die at all. This raises its own wrinkles, though. Say the character got a D4 safe cracking kit from Q but then misplaced it; the GM is of the opinion the safe is fairly simple and hands over a d8 for the roll. Suddenly that safe cracking kit is irrelevant... what you rather use the kit, and try to beat a 13 with two dice + a d4? Or just put your ear up to the safe and try to beat a 13 with two dice + a d8? The text has nothing to say on this obvious question.

The question of difficulty gets hairier when you realize the game is tracking difficulty in three unrelated ways. For one, players always want to beat a 13, but circumstances can move that number up and down. Two, the GM can assign difficulty dice in place of gear if necessary, on a scale of d12 simple to d4 really hard. And third, the GM can represent difficulty by telling the player to roll larger or smaller dice than their character sheet tells them to (for situations, like, firing outside your gun's effective range, etc). None of the game's wordcount is dedicated to explaining how to consider the interplay of these three modes of difficulty... if the player has two dice, should I assign a difficulty die and also make them roll worse dice for another obstacle? Just one or the other? How do I choose which? The GM has the tools to modify the difficulty on the front and back ends (the target number, and the dice being rolled) without any direction on how to use this power responsibly.

The equipment section is, as mentioned, devoid of guidance on how to represent the gear mechanically -- no examples of dice ratings for anything (there is eventuallyan example of dice for weapons, but that's it). Additionally, a number of entries are apocryphal, sporting terminology lifted from earlier editions of Top Secret: stats or mechanics that are entirely absent from NWO.

A number of tables are absent from the book, including a grappling table -- that, examining the rules, I'm honestly uncertain is necessary or not? That should be a sign of the lack of clarity in the game: I don't know if I need the grappling table or not... I just know the text says to look at it, and it's not there. Likewise, a particular weapons table is absent from the equipment section.

The combat section of the rules are likewise lacking clarity: we are given fairly concise, clear instructions on how to operate NWO's action point based combat economy, but these instructions fall apart under examination. When grappling, do you have to spend your whole round maintaining the grapple? Does the victim get a single chance to escape, or as many chances as they have action points? What if they have more action points than you? When you purchase the Hand to Hand fighting skill, do you automatically get a fighting style or do you have to buy it separately? Can you buy it separately at character creation, or do you have to wait?

Top Secret: New World Order has a foundation of very interesting ideas: lightning quick resolution using a fun handful of dice should be the killer app for spy action. However it is mired in its own lack of clarity and very poor editing. Possibly worst of all, there is no GM guidance section, and no time is spent aligning the reader with the author's intent in terms of what kind of game this is: is this meant for flashy James Bond spies-as-rock-stars? The rules don't seem to keep with that... is the group meant to be more in the vein of Jason Bourne, dirty and scrambling to get by? The text dedicated to bizarre gadgets like robotic birds that attack you and guns that shoot glue seem bizarre, then. I can sift through it to guess what it wants from me, but ideally the writer should save me the work.

In the end, the game isn't beyond saving. I give it a 2. I can go through this, I can see the exposed bones of the poor design or writing choices and I can do my best to patch it. I shouldn't have to, but I can -- and once I do, I will likely have fun.

This is a first read review only, without any playtest. Off the bat, the inside b&w look is very minimalist and not too appealing (layout, font and art), with some larger margins every even page (presumably to accomodate the hardcover binding) and large rule summary boxes that fill space which could have been better used for something else. Compared to Cold Shadows, another espionage kickstarter that raised three times less money and had a hardcover included in a 65$ pledge (vs 100$ pledge or 50$ add-on for Top Secret NWO), you feel kind of cheated. The "flow" of the rules is also oddly set, sometimes "interrupted" by an example or a large table on mutiple pages (there are a lot of tables in that book, big and small, 42 of them actually.) As for content, you get rules but nothing much in the way of GM advice and no setting either, not even for ICON, the agency the players are supposed to be working for. Again, for the same amount of pages, other games, like Classified and Cold Shadows, have managed to include those. The rules do however cover a lot of grounds, from combat to car chases to interrogation, hacking and surveillance, but you get the feeling that not all of it is "meshing" together smoothly. While the character sheet does give a Cortex or Savage World vibe to the game, with assigned dice from d4 to d12, the underlying rules are surprisingly more (and unnecessarily so IMHO) crunchy, with action points based turns, sub-specialities in skills (called proficiencies), acceleration & breaking rates, handling class and maneuver range for vehicles, lots of tables for modifiers, and not to mention quite deadly (a single 9mm shot does 2d8 dmg at medium range +any amount you beat the defender's roll by, for an average dmg of maybe 10, while an average d8 pulse PC has 18 hit points.) Aside from a few poorly explained but important rules (Decision dice, Difficulty and Asset value setting), some choices also seem unlikely, like a long list of physical/mental Impairments that would "cripple" a PC (narcolepsy anyone!?) they can take in "exchange" for an extra specialized skill, something they can get after a few missions under their belt, or downright silly (malodor, sticky and slippery "weapons" as well as 3 000$ starting money/d4 equipment limit when even an economy car costs 15K and is d6 level, which you will not be able to receive freely before 15 missions, not to mention that no guns (of the only 15 listed) has any price nor equipment any clearance value listed.) As a KS backer, I feel we didn't get the game we were shown, or worse, only shown the best part (the character sheet). I just hope it wasn't done on purpose, to hide either those unpolished or unfinished rules. Fortunately, the PDF was only 10$, so that's "acceptable" (the box set cost me quite more, especially with the added costs of shipping and exchange rate), but I wouldn't pay the 20$ they are asking for it now, not when you can get a better game for less.