A Brief Review: Mystery Express

So here it is, my review of Mystery Express. Mystery Express is a clone of Clue, a class who-dunnit. Somebody has been murdered on the train, and it is up to you to figure out:

1. Who did it
2. Why they did it
3. Where they did it
4. What they did it with
5. What time they did it

The deduction is accomplished with a deck of cards that has two cards for each of the options for the who, why, where, and what categories. Time is figured out via a different mechanic. At the start of the game, one card for each category is removed. So each option will be complete (2 cards) except for the correct options.

Gah, I hope that made sense. In other words, if you, at any point, have seen both of the "gun" cards, then you know that the murder weapon was not a gun. BUT, if you know that there is only one "rope" card in the deck, then it must be the murder weapon.

At the start of the game, the entire deck of cards is dealt out to the players in the game. Thus, each player has a tiny portion of the puzzle. On a players turn, they can take different actions, which spend the limited time points that a player has on their turn. This is very similar to any other Action Point game. You have X amount of points to do Y different things that each cost some number of points.

These options work to force players to pass cards around the table. But you can also choice specific categories and utilize the actions to gain more information (see more cards) in that category. The easiest way to know that one option is not the correct option is to have both in your hand at one time. But this is pretty hard to accomplish. The only way you will be able to do well in the game is to keep track of where cards are going. So I may know that Player A had the "jealousy" card earlier in the game, but Player C has it now. So if Player A reveals another "jealousy" card, I know that it was not the motive behind the murder.

The game is over at the end of a set number of rounds. Players are given the opportunity to enter some guesses in the earlier round, but in this round, you must put down your final guesses. The player with the most correct guesses/deductions wins.

I suppose that the game is really not that bad, but the production definitely threw me off. I was most annoyed with the board. The game doesn't really need a board. Players already hand outs that detailed their available actions, and it is pointless to have the player pawns move from train to train to execute those actions. If anything, an individual "time/action point" track would have been a better use of space. I found it incredibly annoying to have to move my character on the board to make an action and then to have to hunt down the correct train car that contained that action.

Still, this type of deduction game is not my thing. The game focuses more on a players' ability to track cards over the course of the game than on their actual deductive reasoning. For this reason, I doubt that I will play this again anytime soon. There are other deduction games that I would much rather play.