Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a cooperative or solitaire board game originally from 1982, and then republished in 2014. Few board games from that era are tolerable today, but SH:CD is an exception. It also feels totally fresh. During those 30 years basically nobody did anything with the system, there were no spiritual or mechnical successors.
Here’s how it works. You start the scenario with a description of the mystery. Usually it’s like a decent pastiche of the opening of a Sherlock Holmes story. But it can be something different too, like just being told “there’s something interesting in todays newspaper, figure out what”. A turn consists of a player selecting a location to visit and reading the text associated with that location out loud. Then the next player chooses a location, reads the text out loud, etc.
There is no further interaction with the scene beyond that.
At any time the group can stop playing, and proceed to answer questions about the case. You don’t know the questions beforehand, so if you didn’t do sufficient investigation, you might not even have any idea of what the question is about let alone have the right answer. Your score (either as a group or as individuals) will be increased by getting questions right, and reduced by visiting more locations.
The game has four main components. Most importantly, for every scenario (10 scenarios in base game) there’s a case book. The case book is indexed by location, with each entry having some amount of text explaining what happens when you visit that location. It might be as little as 10 words, or it might be up to two pages.
How do you find locations to visit? The main tool for that is the Directory, an alphabetical index of people and businesses. The Directory is huge, probably 2k-3k entries, so you’ll never find anything from there by chance. Instead you’d need to pick up the right clues from the text.
Finally, there’s a couple of less important components. The map of London is used mostly to gauge distances between different locations, but can occasionally be useful for other things, like street names or finding major landmarks / locations. There’s also a newspaper (a double sided A3, with normal newspaper sized print) with short articles, ads, classifieds etc. any of which might provide crucial clues.
In some ways the game is absolutely brilliant. It gets the feel of a Holmesian investigation just right. You need to pay attention to tiny and sometimes seemingly irrelevant details, link them up just right, and make bold leaps of deduction. It is not enough to simply think about the mechanics of the crime, but of fuzzier things like character personalities etc. There are red herrings and totally separate subplots that can drag you off course and make you waste valuable time.
The game does however have two major problems. The first one is that the implied goal is to play as little of the game as possible. There’s a “par number” for each scenario, which tends to be absurdly low. I’ve bought a game with 10 scenarios, none of which I’ll ever be able to replay. Why are the incentives of the game set up such that I should ignore 90% of the content?
Second, while most of the scenarios I’ve played through so far have been pretty satisfying (with the exception of case 3, more on that below), a lot of them suffer from the same problem. Usually after about 10 visited locations we have the shape of the mystery right. Often we even have all the details right, but we just don’t have proof, there’s no smoking gun or confession. It is obvious exactly which bit of evidence we’d need, or which person we’d need to talk to. We’ll visit locations that are less and less likely to yield that final bit of insight, until we give up. And it turns out that the proof was never there in the first place; you really were supposed to just proclaim the case solved after coming up with a plausible theory.
It’s obvious why this problem exists. You do not want the players to find a smoking gun by coincidence, but since the contents of each location are completely static, it’s not possible to give the players who’ve deduced thing X different information than those that didn’t. You’d need to come up with ways of hiding the information into a location that only the first group would think to visit. But that’s a hard thing to pull off repeatedly.
I don’t find these to be fatal flaws, you just need to understand that this is something you play for the experience, not for getting an optimal score. I’m still really looking forward to new game sessions. And I can’t wait for the expansion, so that we can stop rationing scenarios.
The 2014 Ystari edition is kind of rubbish. There’s a lot of small typos / OCR mistakes all over the place. At least one case (case 3; the Mystified Murderess) is totally destroyed by sloppy editing (they changed the plot, but in the English translation they left the original text in place for some locations). The new plot also makes very little sense even if you print replacement components.
Finally, while reading up on Deadline, I stumbled on a 1982 issue of Softline that had an article on detective games. And that had this great bit with one of the designers of SH:CD that really gets at a key distinction between pure puzzles and the kinds of games I was thinking about in the original post:
For Grady, the difference between a logic game and a mystery is that a mystery gives you unexplained events from which you must deduce a larger context; a logic puzzle tells you what happened and leaves you to infer the specific events that make up that context. “In real life, if a policeman walks into a room and finds a dead body, that’s all he knows.”
I suspect that looking at things through that lens makes accepting the game’s problems easier.