Suspects: Adele & Neville Investigative Reporters | Murder Mystery Game | 1 to 6 Players | 60 Minutes

Good game. Delivered well packed, safe and sound. Easy to teach and fun to play.

With the holidays and much time-off looming in my headlights, I got this game to give us something to do during the holiday evenings.This games is card-based, modeled after a "choose your own adventure" story where each of the cards advances a murder mystery that you're trying to solve. Based on decisions you make, you choose other cards in the story pack and get more clues and information for your investigation. Beyond just pulling cards and reading them, many of the cards have symbols and connections to other cards that you have to pay-attention-to so that you can join cards together to get more clues to solve the mystery.Unlike most games where each player is playing separately to win, this game is meant to be cooperative - all players work together as a team to suggest hypotheses, identify clues, and make decisions about the next steps to take. It does make this game playable by one person if desired.The game is packaged with great looking cards and art and some nice documents used in the mysteries like maps and background information. It is a top-notch presentation.While all this makes for a unique and engaging idea, the actual play was fraught with bugs that could have been avoided with a better manual. While the manual provided an adequate overview of the main idea and how the cards work, there was no description of actual gameplay (e.g. "During a turn, players choose to either select a location card, perform an action on one of the previously played cards, or..."). I think the game designers weren't thinking along the lines of "turns" and expected everything to just flow from one action to another, which is true...but after we'd exhausted our options described on the cards we'd pulled from the deck and had no direction on what to do next, we just guessed that we should pull the next card from the top of the deck. This was wrong and negatively affected the remainder of the game since we came to cards that we shouldn't have seen yet. A couple sample paragraphs about how a few rounds worked would have been extremely helpful.And then, there is the story related to the murder mystery. In the manual, there is an admonishment to not jump to conclusions and base your guesses on evidence. However, when we reached the end of the card deck, we were no closer to the ultimate answer of who performed the murder. We had many guesses, but there was no clear evidence to point to a specific perpetrator. When we read the solution card, we found that the story relied on making large leaps of logic without solid evidence to come up with the ultimate answer. I shan't provide examples since they'd be spoilers to the game...but an example would be that finding a general item in a cupboard is supposed to make you make the logical leap that the item was used to perform some other act, although it is also just as reasonable to think that the item was just an item in the cupboard with no connection to the supposed act. Essentially, there is no solid line drawn between many of the "clues" and the final solution where they were expected to have been used to identify the killers.With this new knowledge that we WERE supposed to decide that if it is presented to us, it is a real item we can be sure is not a red herring, I'm sure our second game will be much less fraught and we'll happily jump to conclusions based on what we find, but the first game had us pretty lost and confused.We also found that by the end of our game, we were left with a handful of cards we'd not played yet, and going back through the deck, we couldn't find ways of getting to those cards. A "choose your own adventure" story should have a way to link to every page in the story, but this deck appeared to have some orphaned cards...I would say, it could be we missed something that would have routed us to them, but we couldn't find any links.Unlike some choose-your-own-adventure stories where you can have multiple endings based on your choices, each of the three stories in this game have only one ending, so there is no way to replay the stories.There are a number of anachronisms in the stories, too. While the first story is meant to occur in the early 1960's, there were a number of points in the story where current ideas/words were used and things were going on in the story's world that wouldn't have occurred until the late 1960's. This dropped us out of our immersion in the story.This is all a real pity because this is a fantastic idea with a solid presentation and a great package. It appears that it would have benefited from a bit more playtesting and a less convoluted storyline. And don't admonish players to only use deductive logic when one must also create wild connections that are plausible, but there is no solid evidence to suggest the connections are true.

We really enjoyed this game. The whole family can play.

Suspects: Adele and Neville Investigative Reporters is a game about a married couple, Adele and Neville, who are an investigate reporter team from different backgrounds. Set in the 1960s, they travel the world and solve mysteries that occur. The game is separated into three mysteries with three difficulty levels. My friend and I played Chapter 1: The Candy Love which was set during 1962 as interview with a former chart-topping band, The Candy Love, took place. We carefully read the introduction that established the characters, the setting, and the events that transpired. Without revealing too much, my group enjoyed thinking like investigative reporters, taking notes and discussing the case. We started with documents that provided an outline for who we could initially question and a map with areas that could be searched for clues.Throughout our playthrough, we investigated the mystery by following cards that led us to questioning people, exploring locations, and examining items. We even formed connections between cards that provided us with additional information and evidence. We were mostly wrong on all answers even though my group did our best to deduce the culprit(s). The solution completely blew our minds and was a revelation as to how the events unfolded. It really opened up my eyes on how easy small details go unnoticed.Before playing, we read through the instructions that explained in detail how to play the game with notes, diagrams, and examples enhancing the learning experience. Unfortunately, there were some important details missing in the instructions. They did not explain how to proceed with the deck of mystery cards since it omits any mention of being able to examine the documents once the game starts. This led to a lot of confusion in my group. We didn’t know whether we should go through the cards in numerical order or skip cards with no semblance on how to proceed. We eventually quit less than a quarter of the way through our first playthrough. Thanks to some gameplay videos, we realized that we could examine the documents from the beginning. Also, there were a number of spelling and grammatical mistakes that detracted from the learning and gameplay experience.On a positive note, the mystery cards are printed on large, high-quality, glossy cards and are clearly marked in numerical order with the chapter listed in the top-right corner. This helps quite a bit in returning the cards to their original order for subsequent playthroughs with new players. The documents also look great with commercial grade quality and guides that were easy to follow. Finally, there is a scoring system where players are awarded for correct answers within a certain limit of cards. This is great for challenging players familiar with mystery solving games. I would recommend this game, mostly for players with experience with mystery games as the deduction skills are a bit steep for newcomers. It also didn’t help that my experience was spoiled by instructions that omitted key information.

Received a used game.

We have played through all three of the SUSPECT games and I am praying that they release another soon because we LOVE THEM!! There are three different cases in each box and some of them are incredibly difficult. We improved as we played through the total of nine cases. They really force the player to consider ALL angles and think outside the box. There is a ton of playing time for the price and I highly recommend them!

This is one in a series of games that are card-based mysteries. Cards give clues, or are conversations with characters that give you information about the case.The rules are very simple: you flip cards to gain information. If a symbol lines up on 2 cards, it can lead to another card to gain. End of game scoring is done by checking whether you guessed each component correctly, and how many cards you needed before guessing.The cases (there are 3 in the box) are good. They're entertaining, and solutions are logical, though sometimes not immediately obvious. It is possible to see every card- you can't miss a vital clue.The theme of the game is very mod. It's set in the 1950s-60s. Without spoiling anything, the first case is set it in a beach resort recording studio.Value-wise, it's not really replayable. Once you know the solution, that's it. None of the cards get destroyed though, so it is possible to pass it along when you're done.There are a very small handful of translation errors throughout, but none that affect anything.