There are multiple games in The Key system, each with a different setting (and, I'm assuming, the same gameplay). It's a new take on the deduction game genre. A very new take, in fact; like The Crew, this game comes at a mechanic that's been around a long time with a fresh perspective. But there are also a lot of elements tossed in the mix here, and I'm not convinced they gel together.
Since Clue is the touchstone deduction game for many readers (and this game also revolves around murder -- three of them!), I'll use that as a base of comparison. There are three suspects, three locations, three weapons, three getaway vehicles, and three times. Players must correctly work out three murders, each using the five elements. (There are no "red herrings"; everything in the game goes with one of the murders.) Clues to solve the murders are printed on cards.
And that's pretty much where the similarities end.
A large deck of hundreds and hundreds of cards have iconography on the backs to tell you what kinds of clues they'll give -- icons about which aspect of the mystery a card will illuminate, and a point value of 2 or 4 to indicate whether they're a somewhat vague clue or a more specific one. A clue might tell you that "the murder using the gold club happened before the murder using the championship trophy" or "a male suspect murdered at 7:30."
There are exactly 9 "cases" in the game. These are also represented on the backs of cards by coloring in the squares of a tic-tac-toe grid. If you're doing "case 1" (the upper left square), then cards with that square colored in red offer a clue that's accurate for your case. On a replay, you might be doing "case 6," and looking only for cards with the middle right square colored in green.
All cards (even the irrelevant ones) are strewn out in the center of the table face down. And then you just go. All players are working to solve the case simultaneously, and just grab whatever cards they want from the table to help them. A dry erase reference card helps you convert your solution to a 4-digit code, and when you think you've got it, you grab a board with a bunch of codes on it and a hole for each code. Take a key prop ("the key" of the title), jam it into the hole of your code, flip the board over, and if the key is sticking through a color block corresponding to the one for your mystery, you've solved it!
So much of the approach here is interesting. The game is not "first to solve the mystery wins." When you solve the case, you add up the point values of all the clue cards you used, and that is your score. Everyone gets a chance to solve the mystery, and the lowest score wins. The idea that all players can solve the puzzle for themselves and not have the rug yanked out from under them by a sudden ending is a novel addition to the genre. But I have reservations about pretty much every other aspect of the system.
It's weird to play it, because it sort of feels like a race game, a mad dash to grab the best cards to work the mystery. But you shouldn't play it that way at all. If you move too quickly, you will inevitably and carelessly grab a clue card that isn't marked for your current case. The incorrect information it gives you will send you down a rabbit hole of mistakes. Indeed, you should take all the time in the world to lord over ever clue you get, card by card, since the lowest score wins. You should drag out a 15 minute game to 30, 45, whatever it takes for you to most efficiently solve the case.
You could watch other players who go for the solution board and the key and see which hole they're using -- but obviously, you shouldn't. You could learn the layout of the image on the solution side of that same board, and just have a general idea of which hole is the right one for a given case, because there are only 9. (I don't mean that you study the image, just that you learn it after a few plays.) You don't have that many more plays anyway, if you're doing it a bunch -- there are only 9 cases here. Is this supposed to be a disposable "escape room in a box" kind of experience or a "repeatable, just not very often" kind of experience? I just know you couldn't possibly play it as much as we play The Crew.
Nor would I think you'd want to. There are good ideas here, but in an awkward implementation extending down to even the littlest details. (Why are the clue card values used to determine your score numbered 2 and 4 when they could be 1 and 2? No idea.) I feel like deduction board games are almost by definition meant to appeal to fastidious, particular minds, but there's too much that's loosely woven about this one to scratch that itch. And yet, there's no denying that there's some intriguing innovation here.
Ultimately, I think I'd give The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club a C. If a copy were brought out on game night, I'd probably want to play it. (I love deduction games!) But I really don't see it becoming anyone's first-choice deduction game.
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