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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I wonder what the per-capita murder rate within board games comes out to. If you’re an identifiable character, are you more or less likely to meet a gruesome end than the real-world distribution would suggest?

A quick google tells me the odds of getting murdered in the United States are around 1 in 175 or so, while international statistics are about 6.5 in every 100,000 (And I’m proooud to be an Amer-i-can). There are 2,075 board games on BGG with Murder/Mystery as a category, most of which are going to have a higher murder count than one per game. Finding the total number of games on BGG is difficult, but three years ago, the number was at about 125,000, so, assuming a rate of 3,500 games a year since then (slightly high to accommodate for old titles being added), we’re looking at a 1 in 65 chance of being in a game about murder. It’d be harder to bore down any deeper into these numbers without doing a lot of work I do not feel like doing.

All I mean to say is, there’s a lot of murder out there. Add Stich für Stich to the pile.

Trick Me Up

Stich für Stich…

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“DADDY! You got the next Exit Advent game?”

My daughter got excited when I brought the box up from the game closet to our kitchen island. That’s where last year’s entry, Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Hunt for the Golden Book, lived for about three weeks as we worked through the 24 puzzles in that edition.

Our family thought The Hunt for the Golden Book was the best Exit game we have ever played, and maybe the best escape room / one-shot deduction puzzles we have yet tried. As I noted in my review, it is perfect for solo players or families who want a minor challenge spread across a number of 15-to-30-minute exercises for the brain.

Sure, the story behind The Hunt for the Golden Book was only OK. But all I need is a proper setup before diving into a puzzle, and that game had it. Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Silent Storm (technically a 2022 release, but we got it during the summer of 2023 from our partners at KOSMOS) sets up another holiday mystery complete with interesting ways to solve a series of riddles.

If you have questions about how the Exit Advent games play, feel free to peruse my review of The Hunt for the Golden Book from last year. How did…

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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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When I was a kid, pop-up books were rather rudimentary, but even then I was enthralled by the possibilities. Today I am thankful for names like Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, creatives whose efforts have produced some of the pop-up books that grace our kids’ shelves. Few of these intricate productions survive intact, but that is only due to the vigor with which they are engaged and enjoyed in our home. They are popped until they drop.

It should come as no surprise, then, that The Shivers drew my attention. Described as a “Pop-up Tabletop Mystery Adventure” by the folks at Pop Fiction, this inaugural design from Andy Logan is the sort of box that begs investigation—both of the product itself and within the story it aims to tell. Players work together to solve a mystery via the clues dropped all over the pop-up rooms representing the Shivers family house in Fogmoor. 

Before I ever cracked the shrink on the box, though, I trembled at the other side of the coin. The Shivers is also something of a role playing game. One player assumes the responsibilities of the Storyteller, sitting behind the pop-ups leading and guiding the others through the scenario. The intended experience, then, also involves the other players loosely “becoming" the characters represented on their standees in…

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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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“Oh, did we get another Cold Case game? Can we break that out tonight?”

My wife and I play games on Friday nights, and on occasion, she walks into the game lair that is my 5’x5’ closet in the basement where all of the games live. I have a stack of review copies that I work through, mostly in order, and I had a Cold Case game on top along with a few much heavier options.

She loves a good murder mystery game. Anything co-op also means that she is in. Plus, we have already played the two 2021 entries in this line, A Story to Die For and A Pinch of Murder. (Cold Case games never seem to be about a kidnapping or blackmail situation that went unsolved…nope, somebody had to die.)

Cold Case: End of the Line is the newest entry from ThinkFun (makers of family brain games and puzzlers like Zingo 1-2-3 and the Escape the Room series). End of the Line features all the things you’d expect from a one-time-play gaming experience—ripped-from-the-headlines newspaper clippings, evidence photos, witness statements, and the like.

This format feels like it can never get old. But, the format should get harder.

[caption id="attachment_279255" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yep, that's blood![/caption]

Murder, She…

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When the review copy request went out for the WizKids release Detective Rummy, I threw my name in the ring immediately.

I love the card game Rummy 500. Not just love…love-love. I have been playing Rummy 500 since I was a kid (that, and a ton of Rummikub), so a game about being an olden-time gumshoe detective while incorporating elements of one of my favorite card games was a no-brainer.

The box top made a promise: “7 Mysteries From the Files of the Rummy Detective Agency.” Love mysteries. Deduction games? After games like Turing Machine and The Search for Planet X, I’m always down to play a game that features a good series of mystery elements to tickle the brain, especially if those packages can be delivered in under an hour, like Detective Rummy’s box promised.

I don’t know if “A Mystery Rummy Game” could have been more perfect for me, at least on paper. When the game finally arrived, about a year after this request hit (there were some production issues that slowed down the release), I ripped off the shrink and dug into the rules, carving out time in my review game calendar to make sure I hit this one right away.

Something happened during that rules read, though. It didn’t seem like there…

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Maybe it says something about my personality, the speed with which I leapt at the chance to review Deadly Dowagers. Two to six players compete as Victorian dowagers to accumulate a dowry sufficient to attract a Duke by investing in properties and “strategic serial marriages.” It is a satirical card game of murder and manipulation. Sounds like a ripping good time, doesn’t it? 

Designed by Sarah Shipp with art by Mercedes Palacios, Sparkworks (Panorama and the Princess Bride series of games) has a fitting release for International Womens’ Day. 

“Darling, could you fetch the cake knife?”

Deadly Dowagers plays over an unspecified number of rounds until someone marries the Duke and rides off into the suspiciously blood-stained sunset. Each round consists of four phases: The first is a Draft in which players select one card from a dwindling hand and pass the rest, collecting four altogether. The second involves playing cards into a tableau as Investments. The third is the Husband phase where you might marry or, if already married, arrange for the untimely death of said husband, or perhaps marry and kill on the same turn. Or neither. (You know how fickle these affairs can be.) The final “phase” is hardly a phase at all beyond reminding everyone that no more than three cards may remain in hand…

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Let’s burn some bridges today.

For the past few years, people have heavily pushed for diversification in board gaming. This includes not only getting people from different cultures to play board games but also game designers and game settings. This is understandable, considering that many board games used to be euro-centric with settings involving colonization and war.

However, for some reason, this discussion of diversification does not extend to artistic expression. Cultures all have their own ways of expressing their stories and communicating their philosophical ideas to the masses. One glance at Bollywood reveals Hindus' love for musicals and absurd action sequences. Hollywood has shown the world the result of corporations digging their talons into artistic integrity. Japan has popularized its "anime aesthetic," also known as Big Eyes, Small Mouth, in its media.

I bring this up because board game reviewers love to toss anime board games into the nearest Bermuda Triangle, hoping the masses will never notice them. If I sound like I'm donning a tinfoil hat, let me ask one question: when was the last time Shut Up & Sit Down or The Dice Tower featured an anime game? Precisely.

Let's solidify this argument further by discussing Tragedy Looper's brief history. Z-Man Games localized the game in 2014, and it received a mixed reception. While some players…

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Please note that this review features no photographs, as there's nothing to photograph that wouldn't give something away.

Two Great Tastes Now Together

I don’t remember when I did my first escape room. I grew up doing all sorts of puzzles, so the idea of being locked away in a room that you cannot leave until you solve your way out, Saw movies aside, is pretty appealing. I’m competitive and work best under pressure, so the time limit imposed by escape rooms makes them all the more appealing.

I more or less remember the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. It was the summer of 2001, the year I would enter eighth grade. LotR mania had swept up the small middle school I attended, and I was desperate to finish the trilogy before The Fellowship of the Ring came into theaters. I liked the books. I would end up absolutely enamored with the movies.

I definitely remember the first and thus far only time I played Exit: The Lord of the Rings. Given that it was a little over a week ago, I’d be concerned if I didn’t. It’s one of the newest offerings in KOSMOS’s massively successful series of at-home escape room experiences.

Each little box contains a series of puzzles to navigate. Clues are…

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If I may, I’d like to begin by wading into unexpected waters. In mathematics, a combination is the term for a calculation to find the number of ways to choose a certain sized sample from a larger group. If you had three unique objects and you wanted to choose two of them, there are three possible ways to accomplish the goal. If you had ten objects and you wanted to choose four, the possibilities jump to 210. 

If you had 243 unique objects, and you wanted to choose 70, you would find an astronomical figure. A vigintillion, in fact. 1.3 x 10^62 to be exact. That’s a number that lingers somewhere between the utterly incomprehensible octillion and the even more impenetrable googol. I’m not sure who first coined the term astronomical for numbers beyond the scope of human understanding, but they were on to something. It’s hard enough to fathom one million of anything, let alone more—the scope reaches cosmic proportions.  

But I suppose you didn’t come here for math. You came here for murder. 

Awkward Guests was designed by Ron Gonzalo García and developed by the team at Megacorpin Games. Building on the tradition of classic whodunnit games like Clue and Mystery of the Abbey, Awkward Guests utilizes a deck of…

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