If you’ve been following along here for the last few years, you know how much I adore one-shot mystery / escape-room games. The Suspects series is right near the top. I’ve had the chance to cover two other games in the series: Suspects–The Macguffin Affair and Suspects: Adele and Neville, Investigative Reporters.

The center of my appreciation for these games starts with the system, detailed in my other reviews. Each mystery takes anywhere from 45-60 minutes to work through, longer if you really want to be sure you gather all the evidence you can before trying to solve the puzzle.

Suspects: Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator (2022, Studio H) is my third Suspects game out of the four published thus far. Designed by Guillaume Montiage (the Kemet games as well as some of the Unlock! one-shot games), each Suspects game is aligned with a style derived from the books of Agatha Christie. This is important, because it usually means that you’ll have to deduce some of the facts in each case based on some “guesstimates”...none of the cases is as cut-and-dry as other mystery games I have tried for reviews here at Meeple Mountain.

That works for many people (including me), but not for everyone. If you are looking for a logic puzzle, games like…

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Logic & Lore is a game that I knew right from the beginning my wife would love. She is someone who can sit for hours working on sudoku puzzles. So when asked if I would like to delve into this little game, it was an enthusiastic yes!

This small-box game only has a few components. Each player has a set of 12 star cards with ranks from 1 through 9, plus three black holes. There are nine alignment cards, also ranked from 1 through 9. Beyond that, there is a pool of memory tokens (36) with various symbols on them, some meeples for each player (7 per player), and reference cards (3). In the basic game, called the Star Light version, the black holes and the meeples are not used.

Star Light

To set up the basic game, the alignment cards are placed between the players ranked in order from 1 through 9 with the moon-phases face-up. Each player shuffles their star cards and deals them out face-down so that each of their cards is associated with one of the alignment cards. Make sure that the reference cards are on the Star Light side and that the memory tokens are within reach. Randomly choose a player to go first, and you are ready to begin.

Side note: there is…

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Senjutsu is a skirmish game for 1-4 players, set in feudal Japan during the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Each player takes on the role of a samurai protecting their Daimyo, but the narrative doesn’t make its presence known. This is Street Fighter in three dimensions. Another name for that might be Tekken. Players battle it out, trying to be the last man—hey, that’s what’s in the box—standing.

Mechanically, Senjutsu is a card game with heavily customizable decks. At the beginning of each session, both players construct a deck that corresponds to their chosen character. The flexibility of the system is tremendous. Each character has a set of special cards only they can use, on top of a large stack of general cards that can be used by anybody. This portion of the game reminds me of Sakura Arms, a dueling game in which players select characters and choose cards from within their supply. Though Sakura Arms is a bit tidier about how it implements its version of this system, Senjutsu offers a similar promise: the more you play, the better you know the characters and their cards, and the more emotionally satisfying the deck-building portion of setup becomes.

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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The Lost Code is a straight, no frills deduction game. Each player gets six tiles, one in each color, and a display to hold those tiles. In a game with fewer than four players, dummy displays are set up for the missing participants. Every tile has a number between either 0 and 7, or 0 and 8 if you use optional rules. You get to see everyone else’s numbers, but you don’t get to see your own. Your goal is to figure out the numbers you have in front of you.

In the middle of the table, the gorgeous board is set up with score markers for the players and slots for all seven of the guessing wheels, double-layered discs used in the deduction process. The board is an unusual shape, and the scoring track is a feathered serpent, winding its way between the guessing wheels. It’s too bad that so much of The Lost Code is spent staring at your sheet, since people are unlikely to take time to appreciate the board. It could have been boring, and it is anything but.

The final bit of setup: take a pencil and, on your note sheet, cross off all the numbers you can see around the table. You know none of those numbers are your numbers, so that helps…

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The clue giver draws five cards from the deck and plays one out on the table. The card is placed either vertically, to indicate that this card and the target card share something in common, or horizontally, to indicate that they are unalike in some way. After the first clue, the rest of the players agree on a single card to remove. After the second clue, they must remove two. After the third, three, and after the fourth, well, you probably get it. The fifth and final clue has to steer the players between one of the two remaining cards. If the last card remaining is the target card, everyone wins!

I’ll note here that while the clue giver does draw a new card to replace each clue, we discovered a fun—and profusely sweaty—variant in which the clue giver is limited to the five cards they drew at the beginning of the game. They have to figure out the best…

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From the rulebook: “It’s summertime. Amid the forest lies the glade. Bring your forest to life with creatures, leaves and forest fruits. Create sets of 3 tiles to place a toadstool into the glade. Complete a set of 4 tiles to add a toadstool into your store. Use toadstools in your store for extra actions.”

That’s The Glade in a nutshell (pun totally intended). In this quaint, abstract, tile-laying game from renowned designer Richard Breese (Keyflower, Keyper), the players will be drawing tiles from a bag, adding them to their tile rack, and then placing tiles into their tableau to create sets and score points. And when all is said and done and the last leaf has fallen, the player with the most points wins.

Of course this is a very high-level overview of the game. If you just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play The Glade.

Setup

A game of The Glade is set up thusly:

Place the Glade board in the middle of the playing area. Then, each player receives a Forest board (turned to its basic side*) which they place next to the Glade board, abutting…

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The board game industry loves to fixate on popular trends. Whenever a TV show, movie, or book becomes a breakout hit, publishers quickly push out board games trying to cash in on the craze. For example, The Walking Dead sparked a glut of zombie-themed games for a time. Similarly, Game of Thrones led to many backstabbing political games about scheming nobles. Even entire mechanics and genres will get a spotlight, like social deduction games proliferating after The Resistance grew popular. Which is why I’m so surprised that, despite the highly popular Among Us video game, only one board game attempted to translate that experience into tabletop: the topic of today’s review.

Among Cultists—because subtlety is for the weak—sounds like your typical social deduction game at first glance. The bad team, the cultists in this one, know each other and want to kill the other team or hit the round limit. The good team, the investigators, either want to vote out the cultists or score enough points to win.

Investigators earn points by playing cards to location decks, then flipping those cards over hoping to reveal success symbols. It shares similarities to Among Us - players move their character tokens around a map to colored room spaces as indicated on their route cards to take actions. However, the cultists aren't…

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Did you know that the guy who designed The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is also the brains behind one of the best deductive game series on the market?

Thomas Sing has designed both of The Crew games (published by KOSMOS). The Crew is one of the reasons why it feels like billions of trick-taking games hit the market over the last 3-4 years. Sing has also designed five games in the family deductive game series The Key, published by HABA.

I reviewed three of the five games last spring in a single review. The mix of real-time investigation and a scoring system that rewards efficiency was a winner in my household; my kids love these games!

If you have never played The Key, feel free to read my previous article detailing the play system. Nothing has changed with Royal Star Casino Burglary except the criminals and the types of puzzles that can be solved here. Don’t worry, no spoilers here! I will talk about the puzzle format this time around to give you a sense of whether this game is right for you.

Tetris!

In Royal Star Casino Burglary, three criminals have broken into the vaults of a casino and tried to make…

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There’s something about the cover for At the Office, a new release from designer Reiner Knizia and Polish publisher Trefl, that’s deeply evocative. Artist Michał Ambrzykowski perfectly captures the essence of an anonymous mug from a workplace break room. Look at the cover for more than a moment, and you realize that mug is inside a coffee dispenser. I can hear the sound the machine makes when you press the button to brew and dispense the coffee. I can smell it. I’m there, in my khakis, spacing out while I wait for the process to finish.

When you open the box, you find the standard accoutrement for a roll & write. There’s a manual, of course, four pencils, five dice, and a pad of double-sided player sheets. Each side shows the same pyramid of office employees. They appear to have coordinated for portrait day, as each group is wearing a uniquely colored t-shirt. There’s a fifth group, a multicolored cohort of five bespectacled workers, that overlaps the color groups.

On your turn, roll the five dice. Four of them correspond to the colors of the employee shirts. The fifth, a white die, knows no master. You take any colored die you want,…

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Any time I get the chance to play yet another one-shot murder mystery / escape room game, I am down!

During our meetings with dV Giochi / DV Games at SPIEL 2023, I had the chance to chat with Barbara, our contact with the publisher. While our conversation was brief, we talked about my coverage of some other one-shot mystery games that hit the sweet spot for me. These include the Exit: The Game series, Unsolved Case Files, the Cold Case series, the Suspects games and a few other titles.

Barbara listened as I spoke about my bonafides, and our conversation ended with a review copy of the new mystery game Alibi. Alibi is an interesting package: it includes three one-shot cases that each take about an hour to play. Each player takes on the role of a suspect in a murder case and is given a very small deck of cards with their character story and background during setup.

Alibi is essentially a five-player-only game, with a six-player variant where one person takes on the persona of a detective who seems a bit like Hercule Poirot, the hero from the Agatha Christie mystery novels.

Like a good dinner party murder mystery game, no one knows if they are the murderer or not…

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Because of the nature of the game, this is the only photo.There’s nothing quite like the particular feeling that comes from seeing people enjoy the fruits of your personal labor. If you knit, or cook, or fix up old cars, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a warmth in experiencing the joy of others and knowing you did that. The hours you spent crocheting that hat were worth it, because it’s keeping your friend’s head warm. You were worried you added too much paprika, but look how much everyone is enjoying the cream chicken.

It doesn’t even need to be something that serves the joy of other people. Maybe you make your own furniture, or you paint watercolors you’re never going to show anybody else. The making of things is a deeply personal experience, and probably our best way of proving to ourselves that we exist in this world. We need it.

The Promise of the Premise

Unboxed, from designer Jordan Sorenson and publisher WizKids, has a marvelous premise. You play as archeology students on a dig who have come across the remains of a series of ancient games. Given nothing but a (miraculously) complete set of components and a few hieroglyphics, you are tasked as a group with figuring out how exactly these games were played.

…

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Wine, music, Friday nights…game night with my wife is always good, and when we get the chance to work together on another single-play mystery game, it’s always the easiest sell of the week.

My wife and I had the chance to play the introductory scenario for the Suspects series, Suspects: The MacGuffin Affair, and really enjoyed the experience. That warm up took about an hour and introduced the format for these games—a deck of about 50 cards, separated into information about suspects, locations, and specific clue cards with a minor element of set collection added into the proceedings.

All the scenarios score the same way—points are scored based on how many cards players used to deduce the answers to a few questions posed during that scenario’s setup. The first three Suspects games featured investigator Claire Harper (The MacGuffin Affair, Claire Harper Takes the Stage, and Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator) over a long stretch of the early-to-mid 1900s, taking inspiration from some of the winding narratives of Agatha Christie novels

The newest game, Suspects: Adele and Neville, Investigative Reporters, takes players through three adventures set in the 1960s. Taking on the roles of Adele and Neville, a photojournalist and a writer who met at Columbia University, players will once again be forced to deduce the mysteries in the box…

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