Apparently, within the board game spheres, there exists “birth year games.” These are the board games with the distinction of winning the highly coveted and supremely prestigious honours of Spiel des Jahres in Germany. My Game of the Year is apparently this quaint little tabletop game-gamebook hybrid known as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Consulting Detective places its participants in the roles of Sherlock Holmes’ infamous Baker Street Irregulars – street urchins and ragamuffins who sometimes lend their assistance to Holmes in solving his world famous cases. The set-up for the game is simple. There’s a map of London, a London Directory, a collection of relevant (or typically irrelevant) newspapers and the case file. From there, players will be introduced to the particulars of the case through a visit by Holmes’ client and be let loose into the streets of London to figure out the various twists and turns to the caper.
And I’ve just finished it. And if you’re ready to play Consulting Detective, you already know my feelings about it.
To be fair to Consulting Detective, some of its issues may arise from being an English translation of a French game.
There is a lot of potential in the game. Its entry is really low, making way for people with little experience or little interest in board games able to pick it up and play immediately. Given its flavour and game play, I was able to coerce my family into playing with me. As such, we spent many an hour (and far more than we would like to admit) attempting to sleuth out the secrets of the various cases intriguing and mundane provided in the box.
It’s got an interesting flow where not all relevant clues are obtained by poking around in critical locations or interrogating specific individuals. Oftentimes the newspapers will have little hints or vital revelations tucked amongst their advertisements for new dentures and craiglist-like missed connections. And there are many times that a person of interest will crop up in the case and you must consult the directory to locate their current residence or place of employment.
There’s a lot of fun to be had, pulling these disparate elements together to form a working theory. And there are little revelatory moments where things just fall into place and the grand scheme is formed before you. And flipping through the case book definitely has one of those Choose Your Own Adventures feel to them.
It’s such a shame that these elements are wasted on Consulting Detective.
For, truly, I’m ambivalent to the game. Parts of it I love and kept me coming back case after case. Other parts had me swearing with frustration and anger – typically when reading how Holmes had solved the case and how stupid or ludicrous the solution turned out to be. More often than not, we had reached a consensus to the mystery and, upon revealing what actually occurred, left us scratching our heads because the official solution made less sense than ours.
Part of this problem is that there is a very severe writing issue with the game. When the crux of play hinges on the written word, it’s incredibly disheartening to see so many errors within the texts. And this is just consistency errors – which are the most troubling – but include normal spelling and grammar issues too.
I had not realized how popular carnage rides were in Victorian London. Likely performed by Langdale Pike’s tanks. Nor was I aware of the kilting epidemic occurring monthly in the city. These blunders are humours most of the time but I’m left trying to recall a single case where someone reading the passage didn’t have to stop and try to parse what was actually being said.
And while I will concede that English is a difficult language, this problem predictably bleeds into the game itself. There are numerous cases where Holmes’ solution directly contradicts eyewitness testimony. Most of this doesn’t impact how you reach the conclusion of the case – assuming, of course, that you investigate along the same lines that Holmes does. If, however, you just take the eyewitness testimony as fact and don’t pursue that avenue any further, than it is quite probable you’ll come to a wholly erroneous solution based on those contradictions.
This isn’t even touching that Holmes’ explanations at the end will most certainly contain errors. In one case, Holmes was off by a few years in the age of important characters and the year events took place. In another case, Holmes detailed finding evidence and clues in a wholly different location than where they actually were found – and these locations you couldn’t even visit in the book itself!
Its hard, then, to not feel cheated nearly every time the game comes to a conclusion. This is made even more pronounced given that almost every case requires you to end up in a specific location to learn a vital clue and getting there often requires a true leap of logic or simply guessing correctly on which ally to visit that usually offers nothing but dead ends when you consult them in other scenarios.
This leads me to my primary issue with Consulting Detective. Its greatest gaming component – trying to beat Holmes in the cases by solving the mystery in less leads than he takes – is the most frustrating and unsatisfying element in the whole experience. To play the game in this manner, worried about how you’ll score in the end, is to encourage people to not engage with the game itself.
You see, the scoring is simple. After you’ve poked around the locations and denizens of London, you decide whether or not you’re willing to call the mystery to an end. You can then flip to the back where a list of questions are presented to you. They are sorted into two parts. The first part contains the primary questions concerning the case: typically who was the kill or culprit, why did they perform their crime and sometimes how. There’s a varying amount of questions in this part, from four to twelve, and they will always add up to one hundred points.
Sherlock, being the cheating bastard that he is, will always score a perfect one hundred on this portion. You will also be told how many leads Holmes followed. To determine your point score on the case, you tally up your correct answers, deduct Holmes’ lead total from yours, remove free leads from your total then add five points for each step you beat Holmes or deduct five points for each step you took over Holmes.
Needless to say, you’ll almost always be deducting points. Of the ten cases, my family and I were able to tie Holmes once and beat Holmes once. And this was largely on the backs of answering the second set of questions – which are all bonus questions unrelated to the primary case – by simple deduction and not investigating any of them.
However, we almost always “solved” the mystery well before Holmes had. Usually after two or so leads we had an idea of who did the crime, why they did the crime or how but were always missing one of those details. Unfortunately, finding that one missing step would take upwards of ten different leads to find the information as we scoured through the list of allies for anyone with the potential for tangentially knowing something of use and exhausting every random lead we could follow.
This is the primary problem with Consulting Detective. The manner in which you play is in direct odds with the manner in which you are scored. As a detective, it’s important to follow leads and clues to confirm theories and corroborate alibis. But Consulting Detective directly punishes you for doing so. In fact, you’re better off doing the exact thing which the fictional Sherlock Holmes loathes: make assumptions. If you have any desire to beat Holmes at the game, you need to create a theory from as few bits of information as possible, since each step you take in the game is a deduction from your total score. It’s better to just assume a character’s motives or connection from a single sentence than to ask their colleagues for confirmation or details.
In fact, Holmes himself makes a ton of assumptions in his solutions. So much so that you’ll often be scoffing at how he arrives at his conclusions. Its as if the writers, in an attempt to amaze the player like Sir Conan Doyle did his readers that they forget the players are supposed to be solving the case alongside Holmes. And there is more than one situation where Holmes comes out with information you have no idea how he obtained even after following his outlined footsteps.
Even more egregious, this system encourages players to avoid reading the case book. You are rewarded for not playing, essentially. Which is baffling design to say the least. The “optimal” way to play Consulting Detective is to go to a location and then sit and argue about the details of that location for an hour so you are certain your next step is the most likely to reveal more information.
This gets back to the idea of making theories first and collecting evidence second. You need to determine what you’re most likely to learn by visiting a person before you even visit them so that you don’t waste a step. The problem, of course, is that too many cases hinge on visiting characters that have no right knowing the information they have or following leads with zero indication they would have any relevant clues.
The best example of this, and my least favourite case because of it, is Case Nine: The Solicitous Solicitor. Forewarning, here cometh spoilers.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is printed by and probably belongs to Ystari Games
Case Nine is the prime example of significant knowledge being doled out to random locations. It is the second last case if you’re doing them in order (and the game heavily encourages you to do them in order) so by this time you’ve got a tenuous grasp on how cases normally unfold. We had, before even cracking open the case locations, knew that the victim was having an affair with a Miss Monroe due to a personal ad in the paper. We had thus determined that visiting Monroe would be a waste of time since it would simply reveal what we already know: she and the victim were in love and why a number of other women were feeling spurned by the debonair corpse.
Unfortunately for us, for some really poorly justified reasons, Ms. Monroe happened to be the proud owner of the victim’s pocketbook which was the sole source of information for why he had been slain. We erroneously assumed it was due to his current work and some form of insider trading because we simply could not afford to follow up and confirm the glaringly obvious to be rewarded with information that Ms. Monroe herself didn’t even understand. She literally just hands you the book at the end of her passage while saying, “Here, you’ll need this.”
Case Nine is rife with moments like that but this issue is persistent throughout Consulting Detective. Often times we can’t find the culprit because we don’t know what rather irrelevant social engagement the victim maintained in his final days would have some unrelated waiter or salty sailor who just so happened to notice the passing connection between the victim and perpetrator.
Even worse, there are a number of small subplots working in the background of each case that, if you’re playing to “win,” you’ll miss because you are punished for following clearly unrelated tangents. One case had a whole fascinating mini-murder mystery going on in the background concerning smuggling and international shipping lines that I only learned about because Kait would read the whole case file after we’d concluded it.
So, outside of correcting the problematic writing in the first place, the biggest issue in Consulting Detective is its scoring in the first place. It’s a poorly thought out and implement mechanic that pushes players from playing and enjoying the work the designers put into creating the game.
Personally, I think a better scoring system that doesn’t punish people for enjoying the adventure would go a long way in shoring up Consulting Detective’s weaknesses. As it stands, once you’ve followed six or so leads and have failed to solve the mystery, you know you’re not going to win. And then the case just becomes an embittered and disconnected affair of throwing caution to the wind and knocking on every door to see if you ever stumble across the answer.
For me, what I would do is split scoring into two sections. In the first would be a long list of questions. Of these, Holmes would answer only the most pertinent to the case. The rest would be essentially “bonus points.” Thus, Holmes would, say, accumulate eighty points for uncovering the identity, motive and means of the guilty party but miss out on points of what happened to a missing earring or the name of one of the search dogs. Then, there would be a scale for awarding points depending on how many leads one followed. Holmes would always score highly on solving the case in very few leads to round out his score to one hundred.
In this manner, players can always tie Holmes simply by reading and visiting every single location in the story. There is no penalty for enjoying the case and discovering all its various twists and turns. But there is also the knowledge that you’ll never beat Holmes and, really, you’d rank down at Inspector Lestrade’s level for going well over the number of leads that Holmes does.
You win, but you win knowing that you could try beating Holmes if you wanted follow the strategy that we employed originally. This makes for two approaches for engaging with the product and also insulates from the feelings of being cheated since, if you don’t happen to immediately divine the relevance of a visiting French theatre troupe, you won’t lose the case. In fact, if the questions and lead scale are designed properly enough, the optimal method for beating Holmes score would be taking just a few extra steps than him to uncover several additional answers to the mystery.
In this way, you’re encouraged to play more – not less.
At any rate, while the game is starting to take off with its character developments, it’s also laying the groundwork for it’s final disappointing note.
And that no one seems to notice a large chunk of the adult population missing the next day is pretty bizarre.
