Recently, the smartphone game James Bond: World of Espionage was taken down. The servers closed and players, including the author, lost their game progress. I played the game often and would like to put down some thoughts for future Bond gaming.

1. 1. James Bond WOE did receive careful thought. The game was better than most pundits wrote. The graphics and music were top notch and looked and felt splendid on phones. The game dropped with the then-new Bond movie, Spectre, and game characters included not only the flight of Spectre folks but characters from the original Ian Fleming novels!
   2. A slightly different game engine would have worked wonders. If JBWOE used the engine from Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, a similar card matching fighting game, people would still be playing it now. SWGOH uses more complex thinking about character building and promotion, strategy and tactics. JBWOE fell into routines more often.
   3. Better daily rewards would have encouraged more gameplay. I toughed it out some with JBWOE and the free play rewards were stinting.
   4. More 007, 007! It was costly and difficult to acquire James Bond as a character. Multiple Bonds, Ms and Qs in their different iterations would have been fun.
   5. The critics didn’t dig deep. Critics of the game helped kill it. The reviews came so quickly I knew those first avid critics didn’t play the game for any length of time. A few days of play brought players into guilds where there was great conversation and group strategy and tactics. I’m not a frequent smartphone gamer but I liked JBWOE and it gave a fix of 007’s world after Spectre left theatres.