One week ago in a cardboard version of Victorian London
Last time around, I wrote about my experience with the interesting yet troubled A Study in Emerald. This time, we examine a very different take on the affairs of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.
It was a Saturday evening in late October 1890. Once again the battlefield was London, but this time the fighting was over before we arrived at the scene. There had been a murder. A man struck down in his own home, attacked by an unknown assailant.
Who killed him? Why? How? The questions are many; our weapons are few.
A weathered map of London. A directory with hundreds of possible locations to visit in the city. The day’s newspaper. Pencils. Notepads. Our wits. With these we must descend upon this mystery and make sense of the senseless.
It’s gonna be a long day.
I know it’s bad form to give away the verdict this early, but Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a beautiful, marvelous game. To start with, the components are lovely; in addition to what is described above, you are armed with a booklet introducing the current case in marvelously detailed fashion, as well as the locations you can visit.
I really wish the publisher had usable images on their website.
Also included is the tiny, tiny rulebook. The rules are delightfully simple. A player picks a location for your group to visit next, writing the address down. The player who chose the location finds the correct section in the case booklet, and starts reading aloud to the other players.
The long paragraphs of text may seem daunting at first, but they quickly became my favourite part of the game. I got embarrassingly into reading them out! Your friends ooh and aah at any relevant details, before writing them down in their notebooks. Once you finish, a discussion unfolds.
“The French guy fits the description of the murderer!”, someone exclaims.
“But he has no motive!”
“That doesn’t matter! We’ll figure out his motive! He had easy access to the victim!”
Then, the next player decides on your destination, and the process repeats until everyone is satisfied that they know what really happened.
Your group, filled with confidence in your investigation, flips to the last section of the scenario booklet, and answers a series of questions about the case. Who did it? How? And, very importantly, why? Once the answers have been scribbled down, Sherlock Holmes himself walks in, ready to make you all feel like the worst of morons.
The best and worst part about this is that Holmes explanation makes sense. Unlike a tv series, where Holmes notices things that may not even be shown to the viewer, he uses such plain and obvious facts to leap from the crime scene to his suspect in a dizzyingly short amount of time. While you stumble around london snipping up pieces of supporting evidence here and there, Sherlock cuts to the heart of the issue in one fluid motion. It will either make you resent or admire him, and perhaps a bit of both.
Once Holmes is done, you compare your answers to his and you’re scored on how correct you were, while deducting score for each extra step you had to take to get there compared to Sherlock.
Along the way, every player gets the chance to feel clever, and then stupid once the plainly obvious reason why they’re wrong comes to light. There’s enough details here, that every player will have a chance to contribute. Unlike many co-op games, Consulting Detective never gives you a chance to be the player telling everyone else what to do. Since every scenario can only be played once, you’re all equally green.
Unfortunately, that strength is also its biggest downfall. Each case is a puzzle that can only be solved once, meaning this is something as rare as a board game you can finish. It runs out of game.
The current edition of the game comes with ten cases, and while those could easily fill twenty or thirty fantastic hours, they could also just as easily boil down to eight — all depending on the pace you play the game. And while there are expansions available, as far as I can tell none of them are intended for the current edition of the game, so I can’t guarantee any form of compatibility.
Also of note is that the current edition comes with a heap of unfortunate print errors. None of them ended up mattering in my experience with the game, but be warned!
Despite all that, Consulting Detective is the most unique game I’ve played in a long, long time, and easily the best new to me — the original print run is actually from the early 1980s — game so far this year. I can’t wait for our next session and I most strongly recommend giving it a look. If you can find it. It’s kind of out of print. Again.
