Deadline (2017)
This “Deadline” has nothing to do with the old Infocom text adventure discussed earlier. It’s a freshly released boardgame, set in 1938 New York. The players are a group of investigators doing the bidding of an old police commissioner. They’re given a single-paragraph description of the case, and a few location cards to start with (face down in the middle of the table).
In theory this is another game similar to SH:CD and Watson & Holmes. Visit the location cards, read the text there, and use that text to decide where to go. Like SH:CD, this is a co-operative game where everyone on their own turn decides which location to visit, but everyone gets the information. (Unlike in those games, new locations open up automatically as you visit others). At some point you decide you’re done, and are posed questions about the case. You answer them as a team, and those answers are scored.
But there’s a lot more “normal” gameplay and process to this than SH:CD and W&H. Every player has a hand of cards. To be allowed to visit a location, the players as a team need to play a certain number of symbols from their hand. (This number is on the back of the location card, so you know what goal you’re trying to reach). There’s a symbol matching mechanism that restricts exactly which cards can be played and when, so you might fail despite collectively (or even individually!) having the right cards. If a player can’t or won’t play a card, they’re out of the round. If all players are out, you fail and don’t get to read the card. Fail enough times, and locations start to be removed from the game (possibly different locations than the one you tried to visit).
There’s also negative cards in the game, which you play when you pass out of a round, and a mechanism for getting rid of those cards. Finally, every player has a special ability, most of them seemed to be usable once per game.
None of this gameplay is engaging in any way. And worse, it’s actively harming the main joy in playing this kind of game: deciding which place will best advance the investigation based on what you already know. Which lines of investigation look to actually be useful? Here you instead have to visit locations you’re totally sure will be useless, just because those are the only ones the team seems to have the cards for.
And what about the actual detective story? There’s 12 stories in the game. We only played the first one. It was awful.
- The writing is bad, and there’s not enough of it.
- The murder mystery was so simple and unambiguous that it might as well not have existed. There are three suspects. One person had an alibi. Another had told two people they did not commit the crime. The third had bought the murder weapon the day before, got their clothes modified to hide the murder weapon, and hired a friend to distract the bartender when the murder happened. Could have been any of them, I guess…
- At times, the structure of the location cards made no sense at all. Like a location says that one of our suspects “Fat Al” did 5 years at The Tombs, and unlocks that location as an option to visit. We go there, and instead of being told anything about “Fat Al” are told about “Laura” who had been regularly visiting her boyfriend there, until he died in prison. Uh, what? Who is Laura? We came here for Fat Al.
- When it comes time to the final questions, they were phrased in such a way that they give away the identity of the murderer. (Yes, only a total moron would not have figured out that anyway in this case. And it can sometimes be hard to not leak information about the case in the questions. But this was so blatant and unnecessary that everyone at the table was laughing for a minute.)
So we’re left with a pretty unfortunate combination. Most of the time spent playing this game is playing this unsatisfying little card game that has nothing to do with the mystery, you can’t even conduct the actual investigation the way you’d want to due to the unnecessary constraints from the card game, and the case wasn’t really worth solving anyway.
The lucky owner of the game was going to play through one of the later cases solitaire and without the card play (i.e. treating it purely as a SH:CD-lite). Maybe the later cases have at least some kind of mystery. But even if the plots get more interesting, I can’t see myself playing this a second time.
I guess this is the game @Deadline was mentioning earlier in the thread. Sorry man, nothing about this really worked for us :(