Recovered: Sherlockalikes
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was released in 1982, apparently to great critical acclaim. I’ve been thinking about it recently because while I play it cooperatively, I think it would be a fine solo game, and solo gaming is having a bit of a moment. It’s also inspired many imitators.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (SHCD)
The game itself is very simple once you get the hang of it, and it only has a few components:
- A case book, which has the initial details of the case in read-aloud short story form. Then, it has details of what you find at every relevant address in the city, sorted by address (you aren’t meant to just read this part).
- A directory. Functionally, it’s like a phone book for addresses: you look up a name and find an “address” to follow-up in the case book. You can also look up businesses by type. (Because there are fewer locations than names and businesses, what is at a given address can change from case to case.) There are some Easter eggs in the names, so you can, for example, drop in on Charles Dodgson and see what he’s up to.
- A newspaper “archive”. Largely for flavor, but the newspaper will give you some other leads to follow-up on or side-mysteries to solve. Older newspapers stay available and relevant as you go to later cases, so you can spot patterns in them.
- A list of “regulars”, addresses you can always try if you’re lost or stuck.
- A solution book. For each case, this booklet will have a “quiz” section, but you don’t know the questions until you think you’re ready to attempt it. There are some number of bonus questions in each case also, which can include unrelated mysteries, subtler details, or loose ends from previous cases. Finally, it will tell you how Sherlock solved the mystery in very few steps, typically by following huge unexpected leaps of logic like “obviously our killer was born, so we start at the registry of births and deaths…”).
- A map. Theoretically, every address can be found on the map, and travel times between them computed (to reconstruct the movements of a suspect, for example). However, this is not usually worthwhile.
Nominally there is some kind of scoring and a competitive element. None of this is necessary in practice because most of the fun is simply in interacting with the game.
The game spawned several expansions and many fan-made cases (largely in French and Italian). These used to be hard to track down, but Space Cowboys has been doing really nice slipcase collections of the original cases, the expansions, and some new cases (they’re all standalone, so you can start with any particular box). They have a free case available online, and the fan-made cases all seem to be available on BoardGameGeek. Some blessed obsessives have sorted all the cases they could find into a huge spreadsheet.
Gumshoe
The original authors of SHCD also made a noir game set in 1940’s San Francisco. I haven’t played this and it’s hard to find, but from what I can tell it adds some kind of fingerprinting mechanic and instead of a series of loosely linked cases it’s only one big case that takes multiple sessions to solve.
The Martian Investigations
Robin David, a fan of the original SHCD wrote their own from scratch, in the form of a pair of investigations in a Martian mining colony. They’re a couple bucks as print-and-play and skillfully executed. We had fun with them.
Arkham Investigator/Mythos Tales
The obligatory Lovecraft adaptation, Arkham Investigator, was initially released as a pair of free print-and-play cases (the downloads don’t seem to work anymore). Later there was obviously a crowdfunding campaign to expand this to ~10 cases and the name changed to Mythos Tales. These are pretty fun though, and they introduce a few new mechanics:
- Time tracking. Each clue you follow up on takes a chunk of time, and you can find different things at the same address depending on time of day. For example, you won’t find a vampire during the day. There’s also a time-limit before bad things happen.
- Inventory. Some locations will give you an “item card”, and then later locations will rely on that item. This is a rudimentary way to ensure you don’t accidentally solve a mystery by going to the right location for the “wrong” reason.
- Choose-your-own-adventure elements. Sometimes you will have to decide (for example) to pursue a suspect or not after you find them. On the one hand, this can yield further clues, but on the other hand, you can “lose” if you wander blindly into danger.
It’s fun to see variations on the form, but on the whole I think they feel like attempts to reign in the emergent chaos of the original SHCD and discourage exploration and hunches.
NCIS: The Board Game, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Game, T.I.M.E. Stories
People looking for similar games are often recommended these. I don’t think any of them plays exactly the same as SHCD, but they clearly all share a lot of DNA. T.I.M.E. Stories in particular is also from Space Cowboys.
2024: NCIS: The Board Game
Send different investigators to different locations or witnesses each turn to progress that Clue’s track. In general, the game is very simple because the tracks tell you which investigators are best suited to them and which tracks get you the most points before you decide where your investigators go: in playing to win you will solve the mystery incidentally.
That said, it does a remarkable job of constructing something that feels like an episode of the TV show, in terms of pacing, locations, plots, reveals, and so on.
2024: T.I.M.E. Stories (White Cycle)
It’s easy to see why this gets recommended alongside SHCD, but in practice it feels very different. It’s like this: you’re time agents sent back in time to inhabit the bodies of historical figures while you investigate possible disruptions to the timeline. Mechanically, this takes the form of a deck of location cards that you explore while racing a time-tracker. Almost always you will lose this race against time, but then you can repeat the scenario, sent back with additional “time units” and armed with the knowledge from your first run.
This has many more board game-y mechanics than SHCD, and is much more fiddly for it, but it’s also got decades of design innovation over its ancestor. It’s easy to “pause” the game and pack it into the box in a recoverable way, and it gives its designers a lot of tools and space for later innovations. It makes playing with multiple players more interesting by giving them different strengths and weaknesses in the setting, includes some randomization in the form of skill checks and combat, and adds time-tracking (obviously) and inventory management.
The core game comes with one case, and each additional case has a new deck of cards that uses all the other same components as the base. There is a loose metaplot that ties them together, although as best we can tell, with the exception of the Madam case, they can be played in any order. But playing them in release order, it’s easy to see where perhaps the game stumbled: the first few cases are only OK. The included “occult stuff in a Victorian asylum” case and the first “zombie outbreak in the 80s” case both rely heavily on saturated board game tropes of their era and while they showcase the mechanics of the game and their possibilities, they don’t leave an impression about why those mechanics are fun. (And with unfortunate frequency, they aren’t.) The third case, a Dungeons & Dragons pastiche, is when we felt the game really found its feet, and might yet be the highlight of the whole “cycle.”
Like SHCD, T.I.M.E. Stories also has many fan-made expansions, and it’s easy to see why, but it seems much more difficult to write for.
2024: TIME Stories (Blue Cycle)
After the conclusion of the first T.I.M.E. Stories metaplot, Space Cowboys started releasing games with a re-worked engine (under the title “TIME Stories Revolution”).
The changes all feel calibrated to address specific and common frustrations with the first engine.
- Each game is standalone, not requiring a base game. Metaplot is optional and relegated to the separate “Experience” expansion.
- The time tracker is completely replaced with a meta currency called “Azrak.” Azrak are managed per-player and spent in an asynchronous action economy, so the party is never stuck waiting for one person.
- When you run out of Azrak, your character is only temporarily removed until the next scene. This means that realistically, the “replay” aspect of the game is no more (although your score may suffer).
- Dice are replaced with a “destiny deck” (values from -2 to +2). This means that no run of luck can last forever.
- Instead of moving pawns to cards, players literally take cards to read. This means no sharing spaces, and also enforces the “telepathy” rules that we’d been generally ignoring.
- A bunch of other, smaller changes, that I won’t go into here (per-character goals and interactions, use of item cards to replace “locked” panorama cards, no more attrition challenges, etc.)
This game plays very differently! It’s much smoother and more intuitive, and perhaps a better engine for “decksploration,” as they’ve named it. But without the pressure of an impending reset and the accumulation of knowledge between “runs” it doesn’t really feel like time travel anymore, and in fact, it feels much more like SHCD.
Video Games
When playing any Sherlockalike, I am frequently impressed by how much it feels like playing an open-world video game, but a full decade before such a thing could even have been be attempted. It even has the same failure modes! In 1991, someone ported the game to a computer with live-action acting, and apparently this also has been well-received. Somewhat more mystifyingly, someone has ported Arkham Investigator to Tabletop Simulator (I guess so you can all see the same books?). (2024: the TTS port is dead now.)
2024: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Collection
Three cases from SHCD were been adapted into a video game in the 90s. This is a pretty straightforward conversion, but with one caveat: in SHCD you play to figure out what happened. You can fill in some gaps by inference and still ace the quiz. Lacking a “quiz” component (and also the attendant “extra credit” mysteries), the computer game instead has you present evidence to a judge, who checks that you’ve visited the appropriate places to have enough evidence to explain the correct theory, but the correctness of your theory is secondary. This rigidity of purpose can be frustrating at times, but overall is a worthwhile trade-off for the absolutely delightful CD-ROM era live action Sherlock segments.
Writing
Many people have attempted to write their own mysteries in the same vein as SHCD, and it’s easy to see the appeal. How might we go about doing this?
First, we can see what people have done before. There is advice on the construction of a mystery from the writer of some official cases and also from the writer of a notable fan case.
The community around the game has collected some tools you can use to set your mystery in the London of SHCD, like a reverse-engineered directory. And while the domain has lapsed, the Internet Archive has captured the remains of a community collection of other settings and scenarios.
Finally, we can take tools from mystery writing in other contexts, especially RPGs, to be sure we cover every angle. Fate reminds us that every suspect should have both a motive and an alibi. And the three-clue rule is pretty good for free-form RPG investigations, but it’s perfect for building the more constrained scenario of a Sherlockalike.
2024: Postscript
I think of this genre often, these days, when many people proclaim that satisfying mystery RPGs are impossible. It’s true that these aren’t RPGs, but they share just enough DNA that I want to hold them up as counter-examples to your Brindlewood Bay types, which tell a satisfying mystery story, but which lack the deduction of a mystery game.
This post was first shared on August 31, 2020.