In The Feds, players are leaders of FBI units seeking to send agents out to combat crime by arresting criminals. The game is heavily inspired by Gunrunners, an earlier game by the same designer and publisher. The game is played over a series of rounds. In each round, players simultaneously choose an agent card to play from their hand and a location to play it. In turn order, players then deploy their agents as moles (face-down) to the chosen locations. If a mole is already at a location, that mole is revealed and is now a "field agent". Sometimes, when a mole is revealed, a special power will be performed by the owning player of the mole (some agent cards have powers). These special powers change from game to game for variety of play (based on the City Card being used for the game). They do such things as forcing criminals to move, redeploying agents to new locations, making small arrests, and so on. At the end of the game, each location is scored and players arrest criminals based on their agent powers at each location.