Indie Boards and CardsThe Sherlock Files: Puzzling Plots, Brown

Great for all ages.

I played the Who is Vincent Leblanc scenario which took less than an hour to do it including time watching a couple of Youtube videos on how to play and reading the rules.I like that it is like a shorter, simpler card game version of Chronicles of Crime. It’s an end-of-the-day kind of game for me. I have my cup of lavender tea, my back massager, and my cuddly blanket with me as I relax and wind down for the day while solving the case.Butler - the date of the death on the first card is off compared to the other information.

Not what I expected

Really fun but you can really only play once or twice and after that you know all the stories.

This game is not fun. The rules make it IMPOSSIBLE for you to gather key information clues. Plot is FULL of red herrings and the clues are not CLEAR for you to solve the case. Wasted time and money.

I want to stay 100% spoiler free in this review so with only being able to supply limited game information, I'll tell you more about what I liked and a few things that didn't work for me personally.Firstly let me say this overall is a pretty darn good game, you receive 3 different unrelated cases to solve and each one could last upwards of an hour. The time to play depends a lot on your familiarity with the system and how much thinking or discussion you have with your group or with yourself if playing solo. Each of the 3 case files begins with you having a short overview of the setting and crime that has taken place and then only the very first card of the deck is reveled to the table as public information for everyone to see. After this players are given a hand of cards from the remaining shuffled deck. On a turn you can either play a card to the table or discard a card, the reasons and choices for these decisions can be tough ones to make.What I like is when the cards align well and there is an obvious flow of information that directly relates to the case. What I don't like is when an important card to the case may be one of the first cards you draw and you have no way of knowing if it is or is not relevant. Why this matters so much is that while you can discuss with others at the table any cards already played, each card has limited information that you may openly share as you talk together about whether you should or should not discard it. There are penalties for both not having enough cards in the discard pile as well as having unrelated information played to the table at the end of the game.These are fun puzzles to crack and attempt to sort through; I have tried one of these scenarios solo, one in a two player game and one where we had three players. Solo was okay because I had control of all the information and I felt I had the best chance of figuring the case out. In my two player game things changed quite a bit and sometimes it is hard to have both players on the same wavelength and each fully understanding the case and being able to make guesses and deductions based on limited information, but the interaction was something I enjoyed more than playing solo. My chance at a three player game on our third case maybe was the best, I had two other players that time who also like and enjoy deduction games and the three of us all are Sherlock fans in general so the theme of solving cases and really thinking out our cards was the best experience I had.I really had fun but I am not sure these are for everyone; again as my best experience was with some other dedicated deductive reasoning players, I'm not certain everyone will always get as good a game as I did. I am certainly looking forward to trying more of this collection of games though, the idea that some of the information in the deck is purposefully there to throw you off or to mislead you is pretty ingenious and feels realistic and as close as I'll ever get to actually solving true case files. At the end of the cases you get a score based on how you perform and whether correct or incorrect information is on the table and you're awarded a success rate on how you did, I myself don't particularly care for that bit of it, in the end I don't need a score for a game like this the fun itself was in the experience of the game.

The gameplay got me hooked with its simplicity in learning yet challenging and fun in the deduction department. There are 2 more next in this series and I have already ordered for them!