Sleuth in Training

I love "deduction games." Sleuth is one of my all-time favorite games (the bad art in the recent printing notwithstanding). I'll even play Clue -- which is one of the very few mass market board games I enjoy. You have a deduction game, I'll be happy to try it out.

This year, a friend picked up one called Mystery Express. It's a solve-the-crime game with much of Clue's identify the suspect-weapon-room flavor, but with several added twists. The result is a reasonably fun game, but with a very different feel.

The most novel difference of Mystery Express is that the deck of cards from which the mystery is drawn has two copies of each individual card. Imagine Clue with two Colonel Mustards, two lead pipes, two conservatories, and so on, and you can instantly see how that changes the game. Every "clue" you pick up requires "corroboration" from a second source before you can truly eliminate a suspected element from the crime.

Each of the rooms in this game has a special action built into it. On your turn, you have a specific number of "hours" to spend on taking actions. You can move to as many different rooms as you like and take the special action of each one time, consuming your hours however you like. Actions with low potential rewards consume fewer hours than those with a higher potential reward. But you can customize your turn to get info in the area you need most. It's another element of this game that I'd say is a strong positive.

But there are also some elements I'm on the fence about. The "chaos" level of this game is rather high. Many of the actions I mentioned above cause cards to permanently change hands from one player to another. You can be this close to a major breakthrough in the case, only to have a card you'd tracked change hands. Now when you ask that second player to see the card, you can't be sure whether you're seeing the same card twice. Tracking who has which card is a monumental challenge in this game compared to Clue -- one that you really can't manage with any guaranteed accuracy. I'll admit, it's not so chaotic that the puzzle seems unsolvable, but it also isn't quite the controlled experience you'd probably expect a deduction game to provide. I'm on the fence about whether I like this.

And then there's a unique aspect of the crime which you must also solve -- when it occurred. This is arrived at with a separate deck of clock-face cards that are not distributed to the players' hands. And in this deck, there are three copies of each possible solution. At three points during the game, players have the opportunity to browse the deck (as a group) in different kinds of rapid fire, flash card ways. You must simply rely on your powers of observation and try to spot which card is missing from the time deck. On the one hand, I like this unusual mechanic. (And I've had good success at identifying the time in games I've played.) But on the other, it also feels like a mechanic too unrelated from the rest of the game. I've also seen it be unfair to different players, for reasons I probably don't need to detail. Suffice it to say, it's another element of the game that I'm unsure about.

Overall, I'd say it's an enjoyable game that I would play again on occasion. But I'd also say it's probably not the best choice for any real deduction enthusiast like myself. If you have a group that doesn't mind a bit of whimsy in their games, and yet is ready for something more sophisticated than Clue, I'd say you're the target audience.