A few years back after discovering Todd Sanders’ latest work (Pulp Invasion), I was looking into this game designer and discovered that he had designed a game around the old Gumshoe genre.

[caption id="attachment_307620" align="aligncenter" width="600"] I need a card in this game that lets me play as Rigby Reardon.[/caption]

I loved it! I searched around and I located the base game for Pulp Detective, all three expansions, the slip-cover to hold all of the boxes together (like a set of books), and the puzzle-piece playing board for the combined experience.

This game (and Pulp Invasion) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Just the facts, ma’am!

In Pulp Detective, you are a gritty private eye (or detective, or socialite avenger, etc.) who is hot on the case of some nefarious crime that has been committed. You have a day (or sometimes less!) to find the clues, solve the crime, and confront the culprit what did it!

The game is about playing your odds and hedging your bets. But…

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I don’t know what they put in the water at PostCurious, but it’s working. Rita Orlov and her cohort have made a name for themselves over the last few years by publishing a remarkable series of escape rooms, including 2022’s startling The Light in the Mist and this year’s masterful The Morrison Game Factory. In a market dominated by the long-past-their-prime Exit games and the under-appreciated Unlock series, PostCurious distinguishes itself by offering games that push the boundaries of escape room narrative. These are games that stick with you not only as a series of clever and satisfying puzzles, but as stories.

The scope of PostCurious’s narrative ambitions is generally matched by the scale of their games. The Light in the Mist takes 4-5 hours. The Emerald Flame hit around 7-8. I haven’t cracked open my copy of Threads of Fate yet, but the box promises 10+ hours of work. Those are not rookie numbers. The idea of sitting down—over a series of sessions, mind—for that much puzzle can be overwhelming.

It is with that in mind that PostCurious has started Ministry of Lost Things, a series of more modest offerings. Designed with a less-seasoned audience in mind, Case 1: Lint Condition takes about two hours when all is said and done, spread out over five chapters,…

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I sat down with The Morrison Game Factory having nary a clue as to what it was about. An old toy factory, I’d surmised from the name and art, but that was about it. There wasn’t much to go on in the box. An old catalog, a short letter, a page that felt like one of those activity sheets children get at chain restaurants, and a repair log were the only clues. I started doing the only thing you can do at the start of one of these games, patiently sifting  through everything until something clicked.

Story

The first few minutes of The Morrison Game Factory are a heady rush. The game starts slow, as you sift through all the random bits available, but the feeling of progress accelerates rapidly, and culminates in a moment that exists in my memory as though it were a scene in a Brian DePalma movie. I am John Travolta, spinning around in that chair.

Piecing together what to do with the scant bits of information I had was exciting. Why exactly it was exciting, I won’t say. Discovery is…

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Sequels and reboots don't always pan out, but sometimes they are necessary to right the wrongs of the past and move forward in a positive way. The original Mysterium remains one of my top deduction games, but Mysterium Park has, by and large, replaced it thanks to simplified mechanics and a better ending. Let's check out my review.

Mysterium Park Overview

In Mysterium Park, players assume the roles of Psychics who are investigating the tragic disappearance of the former director of a mysterious funfair, while one player takes on the guise of the Ghost of the late director. Over the course of three rounds, the Ghost guides the Psychics to identify the innocent bystanders and potential scenes of the crime while whittling these down to determine the culprit. If the Psychics and Ghost are on the same page, the director will finally have peace.

It's no easy feat, however, as the Ghost can only communicate through the use of Vision cards. These cards are fanciful, filled with abstract imagery and compositions that are reminiscent of a fever dream. They are miraculously expected to give these cards to the Psychics to guide them towards specific cards in the tableau. And, somehow, it works!

This is a cooperative game in…

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I have a special place in my heart for the Unsolved Case Files series of one-shot, partially app-driven, crime-solving mystery productions distributed by Goliath Games. I’ve solved the murders of Jamie Banks and Harmony Ashcroft. Avery and Zoey Gardner needed my help, so I helped solve that crime, too. I took a detour to help resolve the mystery of a missing bunny rabbit at a local school in the case of Honey the Bunny.

My crime-fighting skills were needed once again by the fine people of a fictional location not far from a place you’ve probably heard of, so I tapped the shoulders of my wife and my 10-year-old to help solve the brutal murder of…Jane Doe. Yes—THAT Jane Doe. The one who doesn’t have a name. She had a bright future until it was all dashed away when she was burned to a crisp in an apparent murder/arson situation more than 20 years ago.

Unsolved Case Files: Jane Doe offers a twist to the normal series elements we’ve come across over the previous four games in the series. (UCF: Jane Doe was actually released in 2020, so while this is my fifth game, Jane Doe was released a bit earlier than some of the other ones I’ve covered.)

Yes, the local police force has…

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I’ve never played anything quite like The Light in the Mist. I’ve done dozens of escape rooms and escape room games, and I’ve played a handful of games that were narrative-driven. The résumé is strong. None of them have managed to combine the two in the way that designers Rita Orlov and Jack Fallows do here. I've never played anything quite like it.

To be fair, I could say “I’ve never played anything quite like it” about every Rita Orlov design I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with. In the span of only five months, she’s gone from someone I knew nothing about, to a designer I would follow into hell, carrying the banner all the way. The Light in the Mist just makes me want to carry that banner a little higher.

This is a simple box, with nothing more than a deck of tarot cards and a booklet inside. The deck, a fully-functional tarot set, contains all of the puzzles. Each is anchored by one of the Major Arcana, a subset of tarot cards. The Major Arcana card will in turn lead you to the particular Minor Arcana cards necessary to…

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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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