I recently got Murder City and in summary it isn't worth the time and the effort.

Okay now to put details to this opinion.

Art and Theme:
The game is amazingly themed and the art is very nice. This I've come to expect from a white wolf board game.

The art and theme do cause their own problems. I'll get to how the theme causes a problem when I get to the rule book. The art can cause problems reading the cardboard pads (your character sheet). In a game we tried last night we had a player who has having to always move his card into the light to try to read what the green on black text said. This only appears to hurt that one character card though. The others are in colors that contrast well with the black.

Rulebook:
The rulebook is overall confusing due to the heavy theme that is put into the rules. Story is interwoven through the rulebook and rationale for why mechanics work ('You gain a hardship card because of the professional humiliation of messing up a case') make the rulebook hard to skim and get the important rules.

Ontop of that the examples are in the text of the paragraphs rather than offset and italicized. Again most of the time in our sample game I was searching through fluff to try to find the rule we needed the most.

The Mechanics:
Overall these are a mixed bag. The goal is to have the most credits after 6 turns.

The basic idea is to draw cards and play types of evidence on cases that need that evidence. You can either play cards of the same color (good evidence) or of a different color (false evidence). Then you take a case to trial and try to roll dice (number based on evidence cards)to beat a threshold number on the case. Success means you get credits failure means you get nothing.

After everyone has played cards players can take a case to trial and have the case audited by another players. This is where the rules fall apart. The detective gives a ingame description of what happened (I like this as I love good RP in a game) using the cards for evidence. This RP has no effect on mechanics of game play whatsoever. Then the auditor decides to 1) Challenge the chase, 2) Ruberstamp it, or 3) Endorse it.

Lets look at these options and I'll point out the problems.
1) To Challenge the case the auditor is trying to pick the evidence card that doesn't match the case color. If the auditor succeed the challenge the detective's case is thrown out and the gains a hardship card (negative effect) and the auditor gets 2 credits. If the auditor fails to draw a piece of false evidence he looses credits based on how much false evidence the case has on it.

The problem is the game supplies no way to discover if the detective has used false evidence and what cards it may be. Observation of drawing from discard deck may provide this but overall it only happened once in the 6 turns in our 2 player test game.

2) No plus or minus here. The auditor gets a single credit.

3) The auditor endorses the case giving the detective an extra dice to roll on trying to charge the murder.

The problem here is their is no way for the auditor to know how strong your evidence is.(How many dice a piece supplies). And if the case fails the auditor is penalized by having to draw a hardship card.

Finally the game does have various 'instant' effect cards to allow you to steal credits, bribe an auditor, stop people from drawing cards etc. But I couldn't find a card that compensated for the lack of information problem I point out above.

In summary this game is not worth the effort. While it's a cool idea the auditor part of the game suffers as their is no way for an auditor to make an informed decision on the case. He has no way of knowing if false evidence was played or how strong the evidence on the case is.

Save your money on this one. If you want a better white wolf board game get Monster Mayhem. Simple, Fun, and lacks many of the problems this one does.