For this critical play, I tried out the Ystari Games edition of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a reasoning and deduction game originally created by Raymond Edwards, Suzanne Goldberg, and Gary Grady in 1981.
The game is to be played with 1-8 players, all of whom take on the role of one of the Baker Street Irregulars to solve mysteries on Sherlock Holmes’ behalf. Players can consult a newspaper outlining major events, or a directory of key characters and locations, to decide what leads to follow. A map can also be used to confirm alibis and events of the case. Players can solve the mysteries individually, collaboratively, or competing against each other. The game is text-heavy, possesses complex mysteries, and requires strong deductive reasoning. As such, the game is officially recommended for older players, 14+ for this version.
I played the first case of this game collaboratively in a group of 3. I found that the mechanic of following leads did a great job of creating a coherent narrative no matter what route was taken. The allusions to Victorian London in the setting was critical in constraining the deduction space for the mysteries. However, I did find that the map was underutilized in deduction and that the allusions sometimes sacrificed ease of understanding for accuracy.
One of my biggest concerns going into this game was the leads mechanic, which fragments the narrative across a large number of testimonies. There’s no way you’ll be able to read every lead in your playthrough, so I was concerned that if I chose my leads poorly, I wouldn’t get to experience a coherent narrative. However, the game does a great job of ensuring that every lead nudges you towards another one that builds off the original.
For instance, my group investigated Beatrice Allen, wife of the deceased first. She informed us that the victim was playing golf with his friend Clayton earlier, so we investigated him next to confirm the alibi. A snippet from Clayton’s testimony then ended up giving us crucial information for his favorite cigarette brand, which was important later in the case. Leads are a resource that must be managed, so information is always limited. But having leads chain into each other ensures that every lead is still contributing to solving the mystery and creating a coherent narrative that leads to the final solution.
Something else I found particularly engaging in this game was the map. The map is what gives the addresses in this game physical form, and as a result, is great for constraining the players’ deduction space. For example, a possibility we considered was that Clayton could have killed Allen and then moved his body to the crime scene. With just the text-based leads, we may have been able to make that argument. However, by looking at the map, which gives spatial information, we could see that the crime scene and Clayton’s home were too far apart for this to be possible. Text can be interpreted differently between people, so the map which uses architecture and streets to constrain the number of narrative possibilities does a fantastic job of getting all players on the same page.
I did feel that the map’s function was underutilized and somewhat redundant to the functionality of the directory. In the first case, the map was useful in sanity checking some of our wilder theories, but spatial evidence was never crucial to the case; this case could realistically be solved almost entirely with the directory. Something that could make the map more interesting is if major locations had unique properties that provided additional narrative constraints, and therefore opportunities for mystery-solving. For instance, a place might be closed past 7PM, which invalidates someone’s alibi.
The game also prioritizes historical references, with the map being a direct allusion to the actual layout of Victorian London. The rest of the set pieces – newspapers, directories – are all heavy with Victorian London theming. Since Victorian London is a popular setting in pop culture, players are generally aware of the technological capabilities of the time. This serves to provide another constraint on the possibilities space without explicitly stating them. For instance, my group could save time by assuming that the victim was killed by someone at the scene rather than, say, killed by a hitman sniper from a quarter mile away since that technology didn’t exist at the time.
On the flip side, there is the possibility of information slipping through the cracks if players are not fully tuned into the allusion. For example, we didn’t realize that the directory also had locations on it, and it was not stated in the instructions. Maybe someone who is familiar with what an old-timey directory is would be fine, but since none of us had ever worked with something like that before it was a crucial piece of information we didn’t have.
Being a text-heavy game, the experience can be quite inaccessible to blind/low-vision individuals. The game addresses this somewhat by having a “lead investigator” role, which also has the role of being a narrator. Verbal narration ensures that one does not need to read the text in order to understand the narrative. However, it is almost a necessity to re-read the leads individually after the initial narration to progress your personal train of thought. Having to have someone else read out the leads every time you want to confirm something is not feasible for this kind of game.
The map also seems to provide a less text-heavy deduction tool for players who prefer spatial reasoning. However, the map is completely flat and there are no tactile markers to place, making this still an inaccessible feature.
