Two weeks ago in a cardboard version of Victorian London
We were sitting in the back of the local game store, staring at a map of late 19th century Europe. The battlefield was the heart of London itself. The prize, dominion of the entire city, an important piece in a secret struggle spanning most of the continent.
Feigning interest, we invest a few more influence cubes into the struggle. The trap is simple — the enemy must choose between yielding the city, or spending all their remaining influence on keeping it from us. We’ve already invested too much into the fight, too many turns for them to simply let it go.
He pushes the last of his little wooden cubes onto the field. We could keep fighting and take the city a few turns later, but since the loser of a bid regains all his influence and the winner does not, the stronger play is to just let them have it for now. With their allies similarly exhausted, and our agents still remaining in the city, it would be unlikely they could mount any significant defense against the coming counter-attack.
Let’s step back a bit. The game is A Study in Emerald, based on the short story of the same name by Neil Gaiman. We’re seven people crowded around a small wooden table, playing a game designed for five at most. Instead of doing the sensible thing and splitting up into two groups, we’re having the extra players co-pilot. It’s probably not the best way to experience a game for the first time, but we made it work… somehow.
Ostensibly, A Study in Emerald is a Sherlock Holmes game with Lovecraftian influences. Interstellar gods beyond mortal understanding have siezed control of the planet and held it for the past 700 years. Only just now has technology progressed to the point where humanity can stand a chance at fighting back.
You are agents. Top men. People of influence, with such inspired code names as Agent Monday and Agent Thursday. You are privy to the truth, and it is your task to do battle for the fate of the world. Not all of you are on the same side, however. The allegiance of each agent is a secret to all but themselves, and figuring out who you can trust and who is secretly a loyalist to the old ones is all part of the mystery.
Along the way you will acquire new resources, buy the loyalty of certain characters — Holmes and Moriarty among them — and ultimately battle for the freedom of the world itself.
But mostly, what you’ll do is play cards to enable pushing wooden cubes around on a map in an effort to gain the most victory points. Numerous as your theoretical options are, it mostly comes down to this influence mechanic which more evokes the feeling of card based war games than anything related to Sherlock Holmes, or Lovecraft for that matter.
This is a game where you can send Sherlock Holmes to take over Berlin or order Moriarty to take a bundle of explosives and kill an impossibly powerful and unknowable being hiding in London. Maybe familiarity with the source material would be helpful, but the more I play of Emerald, the less sense the theme makes. Are we really supposed to believe that the old ones can be fought back with simple sticks of dynamite?
Most disappointingly, the mystery of who to trust isn’t at all engaging, for two big reasons.
Number one: By the midgame, you likely know what side everyone is on without ever really trying to figure it out.
Number two: In the end, this isn’t really even a team game.
Let me elaborate on that. When all is said and done, and the VPs are counted, two things happen. First, the player who has the least amount of points instantly eliminates his entire team from the game. Then, the player who has the most points of the remaining team wins. Everyone else loses.
It all feels a bit lame. All that stuff about a secret war, old gods and whatnot, what happened to that? Is the fate of the world secondary to the gathering of my personal victory points? Apparently so. It betrays its own theme. Stabs it in the back with a knife and leaves it bleeding out in a dark alley.
This travesty of visual design.
And yet, it has rules in place that seems like they are only ever there for the sake of the theme. At the start of the game, each player receives a token that lets him take control of one specific character, away from another player. There is no guarantee that character will even be a part of the game, and there’s no way for other players to know which character you can take control of and somehow dodge the trap. WHY? No idea. It just exists. This came up once when I played it and it felt completely undeserved.
Another example is this: If a loyalist player is killed, he reveals his loyalty and keeps playing. If a restorationist is killed, the game immediately ends and you start counting victory points. The dead player can still win the game.
There’s a lot of promise here but for all its moving parts, A Study in Emerald doesn’t justify most of them and in my opinion it’s worse for it. All its coolest ideas end up being the least important and the theme seems completely irrelevant. As a cube-pushing secret war game, it’s all right. But as a Sherlock Holmes game it’s a complete failure.
Two weeks ago in a cardboard version of Victorian London is the first in a two-part series looking at Sherlock Holmes games. You can find the second part here.
