Pocket Detective is another of the single-deck-of-cards detective games.
Basically you collect clue cards, which will generally have about a paragraph of text + potentially pointers to other cards. On a player’s turn, they choose which card to visit and read it out. Once the group thinks they understand the case, you answer a couple of rudimentary questions on who did it and get a score. It deviates from the usual way these games work in two ways: how you answer the questions, and the handling of time.
The questions at the end are multiple choice, and you resolve the answers in such a way that if you get the answer wrong, you’re not spoiled on the real answer and can continue playing. This is such a minor benefit that it might not exist at all.
This doesn’t work at all. The need to have an explicit result card for every failed question means that they’re severely limited in the number of questions and the number of options to provide. So you only need a very minimal level of understanding of the case to answer them.
Second (and worse), the multiple choice format leaks information. We decided we’d gotten all we could get out of the case, we had a plausible hypothesis, and went to answer the questions. And one of the options made us realize we’d ignored something, we redid our hypothesis of the case on the spot, and got it right.
The handling of time is potentially interesting. For any card, the pointer tells you how much “time” visiting the clue is expected to take and how much “stress” it’s expected to generate. Every unit of time is -1 point, every stress is -10 points. The game tells you that these estimates are not necessarily correct, and gives an idea of just how many units of time is optimal / par.
The game does a couple of interesting things with the time. Some clues are blocked until the players have spent enough time (which is how they can force the players to investigate one part of the scenario before proceeding to other parts). And in other places, you’ll get different results depending on whether you visit the clue before or after a certain time threshold. That’s a rather neat way of focusing people into concentrating on the essential, rather than just doing a breadth first search through the scenario.
Unfortunately the part with the uncertainty of the time cost kind of breaks the game. Turns out there were things you were supposed to achieve in addition to the game’s stated mission of finding the facts. And those things are hidden behind clues that have an outrageously high cost of investigation that’d ultimately get refunded. It just makes no sense: the game actively and dishonestly discourages you from entering these parts of the story, and the heavily penalizes you for not doing it.
The story and writing were competent enough, with a suitable number of red herrings but everything eventually falling into place and making sense. But it’s also pretty slight. Combined with the rubbish question answering system and the issues with the time system, I can’t really recommend it. Sherlock seems like a better bet for detective games in this form factor.