Overview
In Murder City, players take the part of freelance investigators in a futuristic setting. Each player or ‘jovan’ is assigned a series of murder cases and spend their time gathering evidence to match each case and attempt to build a picture of the crime and bring the case to trial. Their efforts can be hampered by previous failings and by other players. Players win money (‘credits’) for successful cases, and credits are spent along the way. At the end of the game, the wealthiest or most successful jovan is the winner.

Components
The compact box contains a player card (or jovan dataslate) for up to 5 players, a number of card decks that provide the murder cases, evidence and other elements and some dice. The dataslate provides details of the player’s character, and marked spaces for laying out the cards for up to three murder cases. The characters provided are:
Hard-Boiled Detective
Corporate Liason
Analytical Alien Investigator
Altered Human Data Processor
Special Government Agent

Each character has strengths that help them gather certain types of evidence, and weaknesses that make it more difficult to obtain other types. Character development and role-playing is encouraged, but not essential.

The Murder cards are standard playing-card size, but the Evidence cards are quite small (half playing-card size). This could be to facilitate the deck layout as there are quite a number of decks and discard piles to manage. The Evidence cards are divided into five types: Eyewitness, Forensics, Interrogation, Murder Weapon and Professional Opinion. Murder cards and Evidence cards are colour-coded (more on this later). We found the yellow and brown cards difficult to tell apart. There are also Legwork and Hardship cards that help and hinder the investigators.

All the artwork maintains the Bladerunner-esque style shown on the box cover and, coupled with the back-story elements in the rules booklet bring atmosphere to the game. Evidence cards have the appearance of a ‘computer screen image’.

The ooooh factor arrived with the appearance of the five metallic d6’s from the box. These are a nice touch.

The rules booklet runs to over 20 pages and is very detailed. This gives some idea of the depth of the game. The rules are spelt out very carefully and try to cover every eventuality. There is quite a lot of repetition, but this is actually quite helpful. The Quick Reference Sheet covers 2 sides of an A5 sheet. Although only 2/3rds of each side is covered; the text is closely spaced. This also gives some idea of the game complexity.

Game Play
Each player takes a character dataslate and starts with 3 Murders to investigate, and a number of Evidence cards, which they keep in their hand. The game is played over an agreed number of rounds (six is suggested). Each round has two phases:

Investigation Phase: Players draw evidence cards into their hand and assign them to the Murders that they are working on. One credit is earned for each piece of evidence added to a case. Each Murder case requires up to three types of evidence to obtain a conviction. Murder and Evidence cards are colour-coded to link each murder type with appropriate evidence. Ideally, a case should be built with a complete set of matching evidence cards, but this is quite difficult to achieve, so the hard-pressed investigator will usually slip an evidence card of another colour into the case. This is possible, as Evidence cards are played face down. Selling or trading Evidence cards or other commodities is possible; indeed almost anything can be sold or traded (even favours), although such bargains do not need to be honoured.

Court Phase: Murder City might look like a set-collecting game up until now, but it is the Court Phase that the brings an element of story-telling to the game. An investigator wishing to take a case to court must present their case to an auditor (another player). The prosecuting investigator must recount the events of the crime in a plausible story that must weave in the details shown on the Murder and Evidence cards. The Evidence cards are always played face down; the investigator may have used evidence from a different case, and will have to be inventive with his story. The auditor can challenge the case (check that one of the Evidence cards is of the correct colour), rubber-stamp the case or endorse it. Each decision comes with rewards and penalties, depending on the case outcome.

Once a case reaches the court, the outcome is decided by rolling a number of d6’s. The actual number is decided by the Evidence cards and other factors (the investigator has a bonus on certain evidence type; the auditor chose to endorse the case, etc.). The dice results are totalled and the case outcome decided: Murder One / Manslaughter / Aggravated Assault / No Conviction. Each result has its reward (or penalty) and the investigator is paid (or penalised). The auditor, too, may receive payment if they supported the case.

First Play(s)
After reading through the rules in detail, we played a couple of two-player games without having to refer back to the rules much (only the section on auditing a case before trial). We found we could each only get three or four cases to trial in the six turns. It is difficult to assemble a complete case of colour-matched Evidence cards, so risking a substitute card is necessary. The real challenge comes in inventing the case story and in auditing a case. The games were enjoyable and certainly tested our powers of invention when presenting a case.

We found that the characters could not use their special abilities to search through the discard pile of one type of evidence, simply because there weren’t many cards being discards. We later tried a three-player game and things definitely be improved: the discard piles were larger and there was more trading done. It is also harder to keep track of cards that had been traded with other players (useful when you are the auditor).

Summary
Murder City is a combination of hand-management and story-telling, with a strong dose of poker-style bluffing thrown in. It works well as a light-to-medium filler; some thought is required when playing, but it’s not too taxing and a game lasts about 30-45 minutes. The game is balanced and the theme works well; inventing case storylines requires players to think within the context of the theme. This game will have particular appeal to fans of sci-fi as there are plenty of familiar elements.