There's Been A Murder

Last night Catherine, Maya and I had a go at 'There's Been A Murder'. This is  small, quick, cooperative card-game from Tin Star Games, in which the players work together to unmask a murderer in a deck of cards representing the occupants of a stereotypical 1930s country-house. It's all very Agatha Christie, with individuals such as The Cad, The Socialite and The Butler helping of hindering The Detective from revealing The Murderer.

The deck consist of 18-20 cards (slightly more if you have 5 or more players), and each player starts with a hand of two cards. Each card represents a character, and has a particular game effect, allowing players to pass cards to other players, discard cards, swap cards, search the draw or discard pile and so forth. By careful card play you must engineer things such that either The Detective is played to force the player with The Murderer to reveal it, or The Murderer is passed to the player with The  Confidant (in which case the murderer confesses). If the deck runs out, or if The Murderer is inadvertently passed to someone holding The Witness, then the players lose. 

This all sounds pretty straightforward, except for one thing:  this is a polite English country-house, and it's considered unseemly to talk about what cards you have in your hand. So you can't. The rules require that you can't directly or indirectly state what you have in your hand, what you know is in other people's hands or what you've seen in the deck. You can discuss tactics, so it becomes a game of very subtle communication, combined with using the card abilities to collect information. 

We played three game, and unmasked the murderer in the third. According to the designer it's fairly straightforward with three players, and is optimised for four. Extra cards are added to the deck for the fifth to eighth players, which make life slightly easier with the larger numbers.

It's available via the link above as either a deck of cards, or as a print and play version (which at $3 is an absolute steal, since it's a dead easy game to put together).