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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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The recent Sherlock Holmes film, which I enjoyed despite my allegiance to the cannon, has gotten me thinking about mystery games and the deduction genre in general. Why not all games themed around mysteries are deduction games and not all deduction games are themed around mysteries (or even have a theme at all, like Mastermind), the theme and the mechanic go together like the Three Stooges and a house falling down. They were meant to go together.
Of course, the icon of the Mystery-Deduction game known to all the world is Clue. People who would know Catan if one of the sheep bit them in the leg can recognize Clue on sight. Mister Body dead! Murdered! And someone’s responsible!
Unfortunately, while Clue does has some nice qualities, it also has some clunky mechanics that get in the way. The worst of the list is how your detective is limited in their ability to wander around the house by the die roll. (I suppose you could try and argue that the lights are out and you are thumping your away around the mansion. That would explain why you not only can’t figure out where Mister Body was murdered but also why you can tell the difference between the cause of the death being blunt trauma from a candle stick or getting shot with a pistol) It does have the amusing possibility that you might deduce that you are the murderer yourself. (Huh. I strangled him the parlor. Funny how I forgot about that.)
That said, there are plenty of deduction games that have followed in the mammoth tread of Clue, even if they haven’t managed to have the same cultural impact. As the shrine that I keep to Sid Sackson would imply, one of my personal favorites is the lean, mean Sleuth, which strips the formula of Clue down to two decks of cards. Every last bit of fat has been stripped away, leaving a game where there is nothing but deduction.
Okay. Sherlock Holmes, deduction, Clue and Sleuth. All of those ideas run together quite nicely. However, Clue didn’t spring out of nowhere. Board Game Geek has games that use deduction dating back to the 19th century.
However, let’s not stop there. Game like 20 Questions or Hangman, whose origins are unclear, also fall under the deduction umbrella. Seriously, 20 Questions might honestly be as old as spoken language for all we know. For that matter, what riddles, bringing about images of fairy tales and Bilbo accidentally getting the artifact of doom, but a form of deduction games?
Really, if you let me play fast and loose with definitions, deduction is figuring out what’s going on with the information you got.
That’s not just something folks have been doing for a long time. There are them that would argue that is one of the basic definitions of a human being, as well as one of the tendencies that got us to climb on top of the food chain. (Let us all pause to think about a caveman explaining how Professor Plum killed Mister Body in the food supply cave with a mastodon tusk)
Okay, I have wandered away from Sherlock Holmes and mystery-themed board games and gone into completely spurious and totally unsubstantiated theorizing. Even by my own standards and I am more than willing to ruminate on things that I know nothing about.
However, I think that I can say this. Deduction is a mechanic that might not appeal to everyone but it is one that works because it is something that we do all the time. Maybe not well (after all, Sherlock Holmes is a super hero because he does do it well) but we all use deduction in our lives. It is a mechanic that’s not going anywhere.
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