Anyway, aside from 'Cluedo' (which is a tedious waste of time) we've tried 'Rear Window' (where the mystery is really whether a murder has been committed at all), 'There's Been a Murder' (which is a great little card game) and 'A Taste For Murder' (a role-playing game that takes a bit of time and effort and gets quite dark, but is actually quite good). But the other day I came across another role-playing game - 'A Weekend In The Country'.
Strictly it's what seems to be called a journalling game, in that it's really designed for one player and you use the mechanisms to generate a story framework which you flesh out in writing. You can (and people do) run it with multiple players, but everyone is working together; there's no GM.
The setting is fixed (but see below). You are a famous detective. You have been invited to spend the weekend at the country estate of Lord Adler. Needless to say he is quickly murdered, and it's up to you to solve it. The suspects are fixed - his wife, Lady Adler, a friend, Lady Blakeley, another guest, Lord Entwhistle and Lord Adler's valet, Mr Cooper.
The game is run using cards, a D6 and (believe it or not) a Jenga tower. Each of the suspects is represented by one of the court cards, and has a different suit (Lady Adler is the Queen of Hearts for example). The other 48 cards are dealt out into five piles, each representing a location in the house - Study, Bedrooms, Attic, Servants Quarters and Kitchen. To be honest they are arbitrary and are just used to colour the story-telling. The Jenga tower is set up to one side.
You play a series of turns. You choose a deck (location) and draw a card. You then find it in a chart in the rules, and read off the brief piece of text corresponding to it, note it down and then flesh it out a little. For example you may find a broken locket on the floor, or a bloodstain on the wall. Or Lady Blakeley will try and warn you off investigating the case. The higher the card the more intense the occurrence or find. Having documented your find, and out the card to one side, you roll the D6 and have to remove that many blocks from the Jenga tower.
If the Jenga tower topples then randomly determine a suspect. They are murdered. Their card is flipped over.
You keep going like this, but watch the hand of cards you are building up. At some point you will accuse one of the suspects, and your case is made up of the best five-card poker hand you can make from the cards you've drawn. So obviously the more cards you can draw the better. And, also, the higher cards with their intense encounters, are better as well.
You can accuse a given suspect if your hand contains a card of their suit. So, for example, to accuse Lady Adler, you need at least one heart in your hand. This is where some creativity is required; you have to assemble the deductions that led to your accusation by using the five clues the cards represent.
The accused then tries for an alibi or their innocence. They take their own card, and draw one card from each of the five piles. You make up the best five-card poker hand from the six cards they now have. If it beats your hand then you've made a wrongful accusation. That suspect is turned face-down and can't be accused again. If your hand beats theirs then they confess and you have won.
You lose the game if all of the suspects bar one are turned face-down - either through being murdered or by being wrongfully accused. The remaining suspect is the killer, but escapes.
The fun of the game is taking the bits generated by the mechanisms and creating a story.
Anyway, I tried a few runs to get the mechanisms sorted, then Catherine and I gave it a go yesterday.
We skipped the Jenga tower. One, because it was late in the evening and we didn't trust ourselves to be any good at it. And also because it's down in the garage and it was dark. But I'd found a couple of non-Jenga variants online for the Threat of Murder, and we went with one of those (a second deck of cards - you draw 1D6 each turn and if a Joker turns up there's a murder. Draw the next card to determine the suit of the victim).
We set the game in the classic Agatha Christie 1920s, and unironically called our detective Joe Bloggs. He was a former police sergeant who was simply too clever to be a copper at that rank and had gone private.
I knocked up a couple of tables that told us where Lord Adler was murdered and how. They helped kick-start the story.
In the first game Lord Adler was found defenestrated. We discovered that someone was blackmailing Lord Adler just before Mr Cooper was found with his head smashed in in the same room Lord Adler was hurled from. Lady Blakeley was very vocal in casting aspersions on Joe's abilities, and we also had a note from Lord Adler suggesting that someone might be out to get him. A maid reported that she overheard Mr Cooper threaten to expose Lady Blakeley for something as well. Not long after Lady Adler was also murdered in her boudoir.
With only two suspects left we had a pair of 10s, and went for an accusation before one of them was murdered. We accused Lady Blakeley. She was having an affair with Lord Adler and he'd promised to leave his wife for her. However he'd gone back on that promise, and in a fit of rage Lady Blakeley had pushed him out of the window. Mr Cooper knew of the affair and was blackmailing Lady Blakeley. He confronted her after the murder, as he'd suspected she'd done it, so she killed him as well. Lady Adler also probably worked out what was going on and, as she was on a roll, Lady Blakeley did for her as well. She drew a poor hand and (not even a pair) and confessed.
So we won. But it was a short game and we wanted another one.
In the second game Lord Adler was found in an disused bedroom, poisoned.
We quickly found that he'd been using cocaine, but that someone had laced it with poison. We followed several clues and lines of inquiry - some marks of blood in a hallway, and a revelation that Lord Adler had changed his will and was possibly leaving a lot of the money that would have gone to Lady Adler to Mr Cooper instead. But the most promising line of inquiry was the rapid realisation that Lady Adler and Lady Blakeley were in a secret and intimate relationship. We found several clues that suggested that was the case. We had a fairly good hand building up with which we could accuse any of the suspects though, but before we could get the last card Lady Blakeley was found drowned in the lake in the gardens.
We picked up a couple more clues and were able to assemble a straight. We accused Lady Adler of the murders. Her husband had found out about the affair and was going to change his will to cut her out. She poisoned his cocaine. Unfortunately with Lord Adler out of the way, Lady Blakeley was putting pressure on Lady Adler to make their relationship public. But Lady Adler couldn't bear the scandal. The lovers argued by the lake and Lady Blakeley was pushed in, hitting her head. Lady Adler left her lover to drown.
Lady Adler failed to mount a defence and confessed.
In fact the cards we had would have allowed us to build just as strong a case against Mr Cooper - he had debts and had found out that he was now a major beneficiary of Lord Adler's will. He could have killed Lord Adler simply to get hold of the money. But we liked the story of the doomed lovers better.
We enjoyed our session and, of course, it's a game where you get out of it what you put in. From reading around it's fairly easy to create new settings for it; you just assign locations to the five decks and stick to the one suspect = one suit format (assigning each a court-card, since it gives them a head-start on building a good alibi hand). Some creative reinterpretation of the clues might be needed, but it's not hard.
You can buy the game as a PDF download HERE
And there's several sessions reported HERE with details of the card-play to show how the mechanisms work.
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