Oh no! One of the museum’s most prized artifacts has been stolen! We’ve locked the doors, and sounded the alarms, but we still have a number of suspects in our midst. It’s up to you famous detectives to gather the clues and find the thief, or thieves, responsible for this mess. Let’s hope they didn’t already get away … Hurry, there’s no time to lose!

What Is It?

A deduction game where players are trying to figure out who-dun-it out of 16 possible suspects. Each round players will investigate a clue, then suggest a suspect. If a clue has no tokens, a player can look at it freely, then place one of their numbered tokens on it. If it already has a token, they’ll need to first play a token equal to or higher than the token before they can take a peek. To suggest a suspect, players place one of their tokens face down on a suspect, or on the emergency exit if they think the suspect got away. After 6 rounds, the clues are revealed and suspects are flipped as their names are cleared, with any tokens on them being discarded. Any tokens left on face up suspects score the points on that token. Players also score +1 point for each correctly guessed suspect. The player with the most points wins!

Who Is It For?

  • 2 – 4 Players – Scales well for any count
  • Ages 10+ – Simple rules, not a lot of heavy strategy
  • Fans of deduction with a little bit of bidding/bluffing
  • Fans of Clue style games – marking off clues on your individual sheet

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Cute art!
  • Components – Nice quality tiles and tokens, good cards; clues are clear
  • Rules – Short and to the point; laid out well; easy to learn from
  • I like that the numbers on the investigation tokens are slightly different for each player depending on turn order, it’s a nice touch
  • It’s neat that it’s possible for no suspects to be the thief and the game accounts for that with the emergency exit tile

CONS

  • Some clues rely on board orientation (corner, line, column), so if you’re upside down from the board you need to account for that, which can be tricky for some people.

Final Thoughts

I’ve played a lot of deduction games, because I generally like them a lot, and this one definitely delivered!

The subtle bluffing in this works well, where you can save higher numbered tokens for suspects to get more points, or use them to try and block people out of good clues, or bluff them into looking at not as good clues.

I also like that there can be multiple guilty suspects, or none at all, to kind of keep you on your toes. I think the game works really well, feels unique from other deduction games, and overall, I really enjoy it! If you’re a fan of deduction games and want something new, check this one out!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 8/10

Designer – Phil Walker-Harding
Artist – Maxime Sarthou
Publisher – Blue Orange Games
MSRP – $21.99
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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