Designed by: Oleksandr Nevskiy
Detective Club is a deduction game where you’re either aware of the secret word, or pretending you are. The way in which you ‘prove’ your knowledge is via a sequence of pictures, and a bit of verbal flannel.
It works like this. Everyone has a hand of six picture cards, and one player – having looked at their cards – chooses two of them that have some thematic connection (for instance, water, age, messages, animals etc – it can be anything) and then writes this word down on a series of notepads that are then shuffled and dealt out to the other players. The catch is that one notepad is left blank, and so one player will have no idea what the word is. Starting with the author of the word, everyone plays two cards in front of them that they feel (or hope!) has a visual connection to the unspoken word. Then, the word is revealed, and starting with the author every explains how their cards connect with the word. Those in the know will have some kind of possibly-convincing rationale: the player who doesn’t must make something up on the spot!
Then everybody votes on who they think the interloper is; the person who didn’t know the word and was clearly bluffing. Points are awarded to the bluffer and the author if the bluffer only received one vote, and everyone else receives points for a correct guess. Play as many rounds as there are players, and the player with the most points at the end is the winner.
There's nothing combative about Detective Club, but some players will feel the pressure of being in a position of having to invent a logic for their choices on the spot.
Extremely low - players are generally playing at the same time.
Rules are pretty simple. The challenge is more one of deduction.
Detective Club comes with a hefty stack of picture cards, and the possible combinations of meanings are infinite. In terms of replay value as an experience, it feels very group-dependent.
4-8
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Although Detective Club was a bit of a miss for us, I can totally see why for the right people this would become a firm favourite: not only is it visually striking and occasionally hilarious, it's also easy to teach and scratches a certain type of gaming itch in a very satisfying way. I do think the game is quite fragile though - if anyone isn't totally comfortable with the spotlight on them while they confect a series of tenuous lies about their cards, it can feel compromised, and likewise if someone has played cards that really have nothing convincing about them at all. But, that said, it was surprising to us how much the bluffer could get away with it, which is thanks to the shrewdly-judged cards, which almost always seem to contain enough elements that possible meanings are endless: and this ethereal space of interpretation is the game's greatest strength.