Well, This Is Awkward

I love a good deduction game, and I'm willing to try a new one pretty much any time in the hopes of finding another for the rotation. But it's a tough genre to design a good game for, I think, as I've tried a lot of disappointing games along the way. The latest (for me; it was published a few years ago) is Awkward Guests.

Like another game you've probably heard of, Awkward Guests is a murder mystery in which you're investigating a murder inside a mansion, using cards to gather (and conceal) information. You must figure out which suspect committed the murder they used, what weapon they used, and what their motive for the crime was.

Yes, Awkward Guests knows you've played Clue before, and wants you to think of it as "Super Clue" as it piles on the wrinkles. There are more than a dozen weapons, each that leaves signs of use you can use as reason to eliminate them. The weapons are picked up by the killer in specific rooms of the house, and you can gather evidence to actually trace the killer's route to the crime scene, zeroing in on which weapon was used by what access was possible. At advanced difficulties, there may even be an accomplice to the murder you must also identify, who has their own motive for aiding the perpetrator.

Making all this possible is a large deck of numbered cards and a smartphone app. The app generates a mystery for you, then tells you which cards comprise the deck that players will use to find the solution. This requires a lot of setup and tear down before and after the game, sorting and separating cards for your particular scenario. It's tedious... but would be worth it for a compelling game.

Unfortunately, Awkward Guests layers on the complexity without actually making the process of deduction any more interesting than Clue. Pathways between rooms are just one more thing for you to track and cross off; eliminating them doesn't really tell you as much as you might think, as there are multiple ways to move around the mansion. Each suspect's three possible motives for murder have their own three corroborating bits of evidence you track too; except that the rules explicitly state that the presence of evidence is not a guarantee of the answer. (Indeed, when I played, I found 2 out of 3 possible pieces of evidence in support of one motive... only to later receive concrete information that this was not the motive. I feel like something can't be right here in the way we played, but it seems as though tracking this information is actually useless in the game.)

There is an interesting idea -- in principle -- for getting at information here. Each card in a player's hand has a point value from 1 to 3, and one or more "tags" noting which suspect or room the evidence pertains to. ("The serving staff says Suspect A was seen leaving the Library.") On your turn, you name two tags you'd like to learn about, and then every opponent offers you a bid of the total number of points in cards they're willing to trade you on those subjects. You can accept as many offers as you like, so long as you match their point value with cards from your own hand, and you make all your trades before looking at any new cards you're receiving.

It sounds like a neat way of getting at what you want to know, and controlling what you expose to which opponent. There's even a little memory subgame here; if you can remember which cards an opponent gave you, you can give them right back later (revealing no new information) if an opponent asks you later and forgets the tags on cards they passed you. In practice, though, it's barely controlled chaos, with cards changing hands multiple times throughout a round and a lot of information quickly becoming useless. It seems to mostly come down to luck who will receive a new card (when they're periodically dealt from the deck) to bust the case wide open.

The game simply took far too long and was too slow-paced. It scaled new heights in tedious note-taking and not in deductive reasoning. And half the table was profoundly relieved to be done playing when someone finally came up with the solution -- after several attempts had tried and failed. (Since you're using an app, you don't have to be eliminated when you get it wrong; you don't get to see the answer.)

Even if the game plays better with fewer players (certainly, the prospect of a deductive game you could actually play with 2 sounds tantalizing), this game just didn't make a good enough impression for me to want to try. At best, I'd say Awkward Guests gets a C-. And it should probably lose another mark or two for the handful of frankly rather racist caricatures in the art. (The game seems to be riffing on a few long-running mystery character archetypes... but this was 2016, people. Sheesh.)

Deduction game fans, look elsewhere for your next fix.