Continuing my series of reviews of Family Pastime games, we come to one I've owned longer than any of the others. One that dates from the early 1980s--Eagle Eye Agency. For the uninitiated, please realize that Family Pastime games--all 91 of 'em--are cooperative in their nature. Not co-op like some people think of for Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula or Shadows over Camelot. Cooperative where you all win or lose as a team, more like Pandemic. This style of co-op is a game where you could fairly easily twist the rules to play solitaire (though that's not always the case).

Manufacturer age range: 12 and up
Manufacturer players: 1 to 6
Fairplay Games time: 30 minutes
Price (mail order in 1990s): $36.95
Price (on-line): $27.45

Eagle Eye Agency is a cooperative detective / sleuthing / whodunit / mystery solving game where players are detectives for the Agency, working together to find justice and right wrongs and all that.

Components: This game comes with a lot of stuff, which is why it is one of the most expensive of all Family Pastime games. The components are what you'd expect if someone sent you a mounted board, and an electronic file of the cards and you printed that file on your laser printer (black and white) and then separated them. You get all you need, but it feels like a cross between a purchased retail good and a do-it-yourself kit game. Fortunately, all you have to do is separate the cards. The only real problem is that the toner on the cards rubs off on your fingers, at least in my copy.

What you actually get (most important components are in bold):
- One page (back and front) rules sheet
- Mounted, color board that's pretty large, showing 61 locations in Big City
- Four pawns
- One die (standard six-sider)
- Two casebooks with 27 total cases
- Two solution books with 27 total solutions
- 60 clue sheets (one per location), each with 27 clues (no clues for one location)
- Extension cases of a different style (with addendum rules) - 12 total
- Booklet telling you how to make your own extension cases (sort of)
- A sheet of die-cut counters for use with the extension game
- Some note-keeping pads for the extension game
- Deck of 60 cards broken down as follows:
- - 5 Shadow Cards
- - 5 Stakeout Cards
- - 7 Legwork 1 Cards
- - 7 Legwork 2 Cards
- - 6 Legwork 3 Cards
- - 5 Taxi Cards
- - 5 Agency Car Cards
- - 12 "Technique" Cards, 4 each of ability 3, 4, and 5
- - 4 Subway Cards
- - 4 Bus Cards

Rules: The rules are pretty straightforward. We had no real troubles with any of them, though I do wonder if there was intended to be some sort of restraining mechanism for the Shadow cards. Unlike most Family Pastime games, these rules don't take multiple readings to get started.

Play: The game is a standard detective whodunit (or howdunit or whydunit). The players are presented with the basics of a case and maneuver around the town of Big City collecting clues--some useful, some not--trying to piece together the circumstances and figure out who the guilty party is and what they actually did.

I am not usually a theme person. By that, I mean that I don't care what the theme is for a game, just as long as I understand the mechanics and options available to me to push pieces, collect cards, and such. But these Family Pastime games are as much about theme as about mechanics or results. And this one is no exception. You do get into a flow of searching The City and trying to figure out what would be a reasonable place to go next (since the locale usually relates to the case properly). In other words, if the case is about dead horses, the main clues probably won't be in the boutique, more likely in the stables.

The procedure is as follows. The entire deck of cards are dealt at random to all players. On a turn, players move about and, usually, discover clues. This is done by playing a card from the hand to move and, in some instances, playing another card to extract a clue from that location. Let me explain all the cards and it should be obvious.

Movement cards -- You can move a specific number of spaces on the board with Legwork cards of value 1, 2, or 3. Just move. If you reach a numbered site on the board (1-61), you take the clue from the stack of clue sheets. It's yours. No one else gets to see that clue during the game. We play that you can play no more than one movement card on a turn, though that isn't explicitly stated in the rules (but is implied).

Cars -- There are 10 cars, some called Agency Cars and others called Taxis. Doesn't matter. They take you wherever you want to go and you get the clue there (assuming it's still available). Like an infinite-distance Legwork card.

Public Transit -- There are 8 such cards designated as either Subway or Bus. These allow you to go to any Subway (or Bus, as noted on the card) space on the board. No clue is given to you, since you won't end up at a numbered location. You'll just move near where you'd like to be.

Tailing -- There are two varieties of tailing witnesses/suspects/innocents in the game. One is called a Stakeout and one is called Shadowing. Both work as Cars with potential information. You pick a place to go, go there, and then have to roll a die to see if you get the clue located there. You must roll greater than the first digit of the location, reading the location from left to right. So, if you go to any of the locations in the 50s, you must roll a "6" to get the clue there. If you go to location 8, you must roll a "9" (no first digit of 0). The difference between a Stakeout and Shadow card is that Stakeouts take you to one location. Shadows take you to three locations in succession (very powerful). You can flitter all over town three times during your turn.

Technique -- What do you do when you fail on your die roll for Tailing? You can add to your roll with one or more Technique cards. There are 12 in the deck, evenly distributed with values of 3, 4, and 5. So when you fail on a die roll, you'll usually have enough oomph from your bag of tricks to get the clue. The cards include a little flavor as to what your technique is--Brainy Questions, Rough Stuff, Hot Tip, Interrogation, e.g. The specific type of technique isn't important except for building the detective story.

And that's it. You move and almost always get a clue to read. The clues aren't obvious. You need to collect quite a few to know all the details of the case. And during the course of a game, the players won't collectively unearth them all. They will not have perfect information. But when the cards are exhausted, the group must make their best accusation and then read the actual solution.

And this is where the cooperative part comes in to play. You can surely play competitively, but you probably won't have enough info to make a reasonable guess, even in a two player game. So you discuss and reveal info to one another before making that fateful guess at the end of the game. You could even help one another out during the game by telling where some important sites might be based on clues you have (imagine that you call your partners on your cell phone to share info). Note: the game predates the ubiquitousness of those infernal devices and suggest sharing info only when people are on the same space or bus/subway stops (since there are phone booths there).

And it works. You feel like you're collecting your info and tracking down the perp, but you have to get assistance from others. No loner P.I. here a la Jim Rockford. It's a team thing, like Matlock and his assistant or House and his team.

Sample Game: To give you the feel for the game, and make this review extraordinarily long, here is one of our recent games. I have placed actual clues and solutions in spoiler text, so if you don't want to know the outcome, don't put your mouse over the spoiler boxes.

At 9:10 on the night of July 6, 2008, Detective D and Detective E were called upon by Linda Lavender, owner of Harbor Motel, to investigate and clear her cleaning lady, Elsie Iberia, charged with attempted arson on the Motel. Linda doesn't believe the woman did it.

Linda's statement: "Late at night, one of the units caught fire. Fortunately, a passerby, a waitress at Sam's Tavern, spotted the fire and it was put out without my losing the entire Motel. Now Elsie's in jail. She's a loyal person and couldn't have done it. She'll be put away unless you clear her."

And with that, Eagle Eye Agency was contracted to find the truth about the Case of the Scorned Earth Policy.

The first 21 turns of the game alternated between E and D, until E ran out of transportation, leaving Do to his own devices for the final four turns of the game. Rather than alternating each detective's clues, I will list them, in sequence, for each detective, so that the reader can see what was learned by each detective. If you wish to play along, you can read only one detective's clues to see if you can solve the case before resorting to the cooperative spirit and reading the other detective's clues.

The hands dealt to the players were fairly evenly distributed, with D having 11 legworks to E's 9. D had most of the Stakeouts (4) but E had 3 of the 5 Shadow cards. Cars were 6-4 in favor of E and E had an advantage in "technique" cards with 7 to D's 5.

E started things off by using a Shadow card to investigate all the reference points noted on the case summary card. From there, things alternated for about forty minutes.

Detective E's clues:


Meanwhile, Detective D was bungling along discovering:


We each knew who did the deed and had some vague notions of who was behind the operation. At that time, we freely consulted with one another, mentioning clues that we thought were important. Of course, Detective D doesn't have the greatest memory and may have left out key clues during the debriefing (we didn't exchange sheets of paper).

The official answer was:


Total elapsed time, 46 minutes.

Verdict: This is a solid game in the genre. It's not perfect, and there is some significant variance in the quality of the cases (the example above was our third of four sessions we've played thus far). Some can be downright silly and have THE key clue in a seemingly random location. But it's a lot of fun, at least for me. Others might say that it can get tedious as the game plods to the finish line. I think this is because the most logical sites for clues are gobbled up early on, leaving only a lot of red herring clues for the end game.

I do wonder how it would play with more players. With two, we have had times where one player has a lot of tailing cards but not so many techniques. That's not a great combination, but easily workable when you have a hand of 30 cards. In a test case for a six player game, one of the hands I dealt got no technique and a few tails while someone else had the exact opposite. In that trial, some players had only 6 or 7 playable cards of the 10 in their hand. So, unless you freely give cards to other players, such a player would get one turn every 7 or 8 minutes, which isn't a good situation.

So, I give this game a , at least as a two-player game. I would think it would be equally as fulfilling solo, though with all cards at one's disposal, you could argue that you could just pick 40 locations you'd like to read the clues for and just try to solve the case without any board manipulation. The set comes with enough cases for 27 plays, and that ought to be enough for such a game, but in case you want more, they include a moderated version where one person sets up the secret board arrangement while the others attempt to figure out four key items connected by a common theme (like, all at rural locations or all in residences). It's more a game of discovery and a little deduction, at least from reading it. However, it does allow for repeat play pretty much forever, if that's what you want.

My main gripe, which is nitpicking, is that it comes with "Case Set 3" (the afore mentioned deduction game without clues). In earlier incarnations of the game, the publisher mentioned something called "The Kit," billed as a way to make your own cases. Well, when I discovered that my set did not include "The Kit," I sent five bucks to Family Pastimes to get said item. I've always wanted a kit telling me how to create my own murder/mystery cases. As it turned out, I received "The Kit," but it was the same thing as my "Case Set 3" (different cover), complete with counters and note pads. It does tell me how to make cases for the moderated hide 'n' seek/deduction game, but nothing about how to make a clue-based case like the first 27 cases. I really would like a "How To" about making clue based detective games.

But other than that one flaw, the game is a winner.

The curmudgeon has spoken, so be the word.