Quick spoiler-free mini-review: I had a mixed experience with the first Suspects Box last year. There is a lot to love here (the art, the new ideas for matching cards and scoring). But I continue to struggle a bit with the actual cases as written. This time I had a larger group play with me on youtube so we could try to tease out where the disconnect is or whether my review of the first box was too harsh. We took our time and spent over 6 hours on this case and had lots of very good discussions and debates, so in that sense it was a success. We did figure out some subtle and clever clues that were satisfying, and our instincts were good. There is still a bit of random choose your own adventure to some of cards where every choice can feel equally likely to have some key piece of evidence in any location, but overall I would say this was a pretty strong case. However, there was one key element of this mystery that felt broken to us -- though I am open to being corrected, that really left a sour taste in our mouth. And in general it feels like there is a bit of a mismatch in this series between the kinds of coincidences and solutions we expect and what evidence we expect to be able to find. This remains one of the most subjectively hard mystery games for me to advise people about and for me to get on the same wavelength as. -jesse
Quick spoiler-free mini-review: I had a mixed experience with the first Suspects Box last year. There is a lot to love here (the art, the new ideas for matching cards and scoring). But I continue to struggle a bit with the actual cases as written. This time I had a larger group play with me on youtube so we could try to tease out where the disconnect is or whether my review of the first box was too harsh. We took our time and spent over 6 hours on this case and had lots of very good discussions and debates, so in that sense it was a success. We did figure out some subtle and clever clues that were satisfying, and our instincts were good. There is still a bit of random choose your own adventure to some of cards where every choice can feel equally likely to have some key piece of evidence in any location, but overall I would say this was a pretty strong case. However, there was one key element of this mystery that felt broken to us -- though I am open to being corrected, that really left a sour taste in our mouth. And in general it feels like there is a bit of a mismatch in this series between the kinds of coincidences and solutions we expect and what evidence we expect to be able to find. This remains one of the most subjectively hard mystery games for me to advise people about and for me to get on the same wavelength as. -jesse