Foul Play

「これなら五手で詰める」

『名探偵コナン　緋色の弾丸』

 

"With this it'll be a checkmate in five turns."

"Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet"

Last year I wrote about Dash Shaw's comic adaptation of the board game Clue (Cluedo) and I mentioned there that while I play a lot of (mystery) videogames in general, I basically never touch analogue board games. Even my experience with Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, likely one of the best known mystery-themed board games, is solely though the videogame adaptation of said board game. It's just a genre I never had much interest in, much more enjoying digital games in general (not just mystery), but the last few months, I started to become more interested in these physical games, so I tried a few mystery board games out myself.

First up is Decktective: The Gaze of the Ghost (2020), a cooperative card-based game designed by Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino, and I believe first released in Italy. This game is one entry in a longer series and is one of those games you can only play once, as you'll have unraveled all the mysteries when you're done with the session, but it's actually quite fun and because you don't need to cut things up or fold things over, you can easily just hand the deck of cards to a friend when you're done. In The Gaze of the Ghost, you and your fellow players take up the role of an investigator, who's been called to a museum which is said to be haunted. It's after closing hours, and the guard has notified the police because the cleaning lady had vanished from the museum, even though the doors were locked and the guard has the key. The story starts with the investigators arriving at the museum, ready to search the place.

As said, this game is cooperative and card-based and the most eye-catching feature of The Gaze of the Ghost is of course how it actually utilizes the cards and the box that holds those cards to create a 3D reconstruction of the scene. It's really clever, as while the game is very compact and consists only of cards, it manages to really sell the visual design of this game. The players are encouraged to really examine the crime scene from all angles in search of clues, and you'll definitely be rewarded for looking carefully at everything. The cards are also what dictate the gameplay loop and the story developments. The deck of cards is numbered, and each turn players are to take a card. Some cards are for everyone to read and detail the early story set-up and/or significant story developments, but most cards are initially only intended for the player who draws the card. A card could contain an interview with the guard for example about the missing woman, or the card could be detailing some observations about the museum gallery or some strange object found lying around. A player whoever may not divulge the information on the cards they hold to the other players. If they think a certain card contains significant information, they have to play the card and put it in the shared pool, allowing everyone to read it and discuss its contents. However, every card has a certain value written on it, and you can only share a card with the others, if the value on the card is equal or lower to the number of discarded cards. Players can also choose to discard cards if they think the information is not relevant to the case, but that means they can't share that information with the others anymore and also that they themselves can't keep it in their hand. So a player has to decide which cards in their hand are worth sharing with the others, and which cards they can "sacrifice" in order to play certain cards, but there is always the risk that a card they discarded turns out to have relevant information after all. 

This makes for a game that's more than meets the eye, as you'll draw cards in a set order, meaning the game can sometimes play tricks on you by feeding you a seemingly irrelevant card first only to make you draw a card near the end of the game that shines a different light on the earlier card. The idea of the necessary clues being divided among the players, that there's a "shared pool of information"  but also imperfect information because cards have to be discarded, and that the players have to work together to puzzle the truth together is quite interesting. I played this game on my own, which the game says is possible, though I think this game is best played with two or three players. If you play on your own, you'll have to draw all cards yourself, so while you will have to discard cards, you will have at least taken a look at all cards in the game, meaning the idea of "imperfect information" that makes this game interesting is less strongly present. What also makes this a fun game is the fact that because the cards are drawn in a set order, the game also allows for story developments to occur. What starts out as a search for a missing woman, soon turns in a much bigger case once a few cards have been drawn, and that keeps the players on their toes. You really have to examine each card carefully to decide whether you're going to put it in the shared pool so everyone can take a look, or discard it all together. Once all cards are drawn, the story is "over" and you're asked a few questions to prove whether you figured the case out or not. It's a fairly doable mystery and while it's not an Ellery Queen-esque mystery that requires you to do 20 steps of deductions, I'd say Decktective: The Gaze of the Ghost provides for a fun hour of entertainment, and it's certainly also very accessible for those who seldom play board games (like me).

Decktective is a very compact game you could play with a friend on a bench: MicroMacro: Crime City (2020) most certainly is not. If you're into board games, you probably heard of MicroMacro: Crime City ages go, as this game designeed by Johannes Sich is quite popular, and truth be told: it deserves that reputation because it's really an incredibly fun mystery game. But you really need space to play this game. Because when you open the box, you'll find a gigantic map inside (75 x 100 cm), and you'll have to fold the thing out completely and place it somewhere where all participating players can have a good look at it. The map provides an isometric view of the titular Crime City and all of its inhabitants. It is seemingly a nice town with the usual shops, museums, a harbor, restaurants etc., but if you take a careful look at the map, you'll see all kinds of crimes occuring in the city, from robbery and stalking to outright murder. With the little magnifying glass included in the box, the players are tasked to work together on the investigation of 16 different cases that occur in Crime City.

Having to look at a gigantic illustration to look for clues of course reminds of the Where's Wally/Waldo books and Pierre the Maze Detective illustration books, but the most important thing to understand about the super charming map of Crime City is that is not actually a "snapshot" of a singular moment in Crime City. Imagine each event occurring in Crime City as a comic strip, with several panels detailing each event. These panels are basically all plotted simultaneously on the map of MicroMacro: Crime City, meaning you'll find the different stages surrounding a certain happening all across the map. For example, the box of the game actually already has a puzzle for the players: you see a dead man lying in a park and you're asked to solve the murder. If you then look a street up, you'll see the victim walking on his way to his murder scene. And a few streets away, you see him with a bag of money, etc. You can follow him all the way back across the map of MicroMacro: Crime City and eventually, you'll notice that there's a suspicious fellow following him around the map, and you can even find out where they came from and where they went after the murder. So all "comic panels" of a single event are drawn in the map, allowing you to trace everything happening before, but also after a crime. And now imagine 16 different cases being draw like this on this map, and on top of that a lot of other happenings occuring at the same time, and you can see why the map is so big.

Each case is represented by a number of cards, and the first card always points you towards a crime, usually a murder. For example, it will ask you to locate the corpse lying on the corner of the hardware shop and the supermarket. From there, it's up to the players to figure out what and why this happened. This is relatively simple in the earliest cases: you can trace the movements of the victim just by looking around to find where they were a few moments ago, and thus find out where they came from. As you do that, you might see the victim having a row with someone, so then you decide to follow that suspect across the map, and perhaps you'll see them go buy a weapon. But the difficulty soon ramps up, and the game will ask a lot more of your observative and deductive powers. A person you were following might take public transport, forcing you figure out where they got off or on, or perhaps you find a corpse that seems to have appeared out of nowhere: perhaps then you need to find clues on the victim that indicate where they worked or what places they often visited, find that place on the map and see if you can find the victim there. The later cases have you going across the map in multiple stages, following not only the victim, but also checking out what persons they met during the day, pick up on clues that may indicate a motive, find the means of murder or perhaps where the murderer has gone off too. 

It's a highly enjoyable game that also does a great job at easing you into the higher difficulties. Like I mentioned, each case is represented by a few cards. Personally, I enjoyed playing this game in the "expert mode": you only look at the first card of each case, the one that points you towards the crime you need to examine, and then try to figure out the who, how and why on your own without looking at the other cards in the set. The other cards do point you in the right direction as to how to progress next if you don't know what to do. They might tell you that you need to look for a clue that'll tell you where the victim was working, or point you to that curious object lying at the crime scene and ask you figure out where it came from. So even if you don't realize right away a character can ride public transport and appear all the way on the other side of the map, the hint cards will help and they help prepare the player for the trickier cases later in the game, which really demand a lot of your ability to observe the smallest details on the map and infer the meaning of what you see. This game is really enjoyable playing alone too by the way, and I think two or three players would be ideal too as everyone will be able to take a good look at the map and come up with suggestions where to look next, but I can imagine it becoming a bit too crowded around the map with four and more.

I know there are quite a few gamers among the readers of this blog, but I was wondering whether there are also people here who regularly play mystery board games and who could perhaps give some recommendations? I myself just tried these two, because both Decktective and MicroMacro: Crime City were easily available and seemed interesting, and MicroMacro: Crime City in particular is one I really want to recommend, because it's such a charming game that can become deceptively difficult. With the holidays coming up, perhaps these games would make for good gifts for others, or yourself!