Watson & Holmes: From the Diaries of 221B (2015) is a board game that’s clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes: Consulting detective, but goes in a very different direction. The big difference is that it’s a purely competitive game.
A short introduction gives you some starter clues, and a question to be answered up front (e.g. “How did the victim die”, “Who was responsible for it”, and “What was in the safe?”). After that a set of about 15 location cards is placed on the table, with the only thing that the players know about the contents being the name of the location. All players will select one to read, using what is effectively a penny auction. Everyone reads their card (anything from a few sentences to five paragraphs) and takes notes. After the round is over, you’re not allowed to refer to the location again. So you’d best make sure the notes include everything you really want to know.
Instead of visiting a clue location, you can go to 221B to answer the questions. There’s also a couple of special power that can be used to lock other people from visiting a specific location, unlock a locked one temporarily or permanently, or force someone to read their location aloud.
Later scenarios will introduce small tweaks to the game mechanics. In one you don’t get the questions up front. In another the locations are split to two sets, and moving between the sets costs some of the bidding currency. More locations will start to give special power tokens, etc. Especially this last thing I don’t like a lot; it kind of distorts the investigation. when players right away visit locations they shouldn’t care about just since there’s a special power token available there.
There’s a lovely tension during the bidding phase as you’re trying to figure out what other people know, and why they are going to the place they’re going to. Did they find out something in the previous location? Do they really expect to find out something useful in the location they are going to, or is it just a shot in the dark? Are they chasing the same theory you are or something else? If you’re low on the bidding currency, should you go to 221B even with a half baked theory just to do it unchallenged? (If two people want to solve on the same round, the player with more currency gets first dibs).
One interesting bit is how much the order in which you visit the locations matters. If you find out when visiting the body that the body was hit from the back with the left hand, you’re probably going to keep an eye out for even slight hints about whether someone is left- or right-handed. Likewise there are some locations that are going to be totally useless unless you have a very specific bit of information from elsewhere.
The writing and the design of the cases has been mostly good, with a couple of slightly unfair (but still solvable) bits. The one thing that is completely infuriating that Holmes refuses to ask the most obvious questions. Somebody will mention that once everyone else left a dinner party, four people still remained at the table. But will they tell who those four people were? No. Will Holmes ask? Hell, no. You need to find out the information the hard way. There are also some cases where a story beat is split in two locations, but it’s extremely unclear which location actually has the second half.
There are two things the players need to accept for the game to actually be enjoyable. First, people should be good sports and take notes sensibly rather than copy every single word. If people can’t do that, you might need to introduce a note taking timer. Second, the cases don’t often provide absolute certainty. You need to read through the lines, but worse yet you’ll occasionally need to make guesses just based on what appears in the text and what doesn’t. “Well, the murder weapon was a heavy object and the only heavy object I’ve seen was this bust. Guess it’s probably that”.
Watson & Holmes scales pretty well to large player counts. We played one game with 7 (all others with 4), and it worked just fine. The actual gameplay of reading + taking notes is done really well in parallel. And it also adds much more contention on the board, making that part more tactically interesting.
We’ve played 8 out of 13 cases so far, and Watson & Holmes has continued working well. A case takes about 60-70 minutes, so we can fit these in to our weekly lunch hour game session, where something like SH:CD would be impossible. (Of course it’s also a much slighter experience than SH:CD). I’ll almost certainly pick up the teased expansion if it actually comes out.