If the murderer can correctly guess who the witness is, then the witness mysteriously fails to turn up to court that day and the murderer, sorry, wrongly accused citizen goes free. I hate to compare again, but it’s hard to overstate how much Codenames and Mysterium open up the potential for creativity and truly puzzling clues when the clue-sets are the entirety of the English language and maddeningly opaque surrealist art, respectively.

The Dixit comparison in particular is quite odd though because it simultaneously captures perfectly the way I think of the game and it also comes across as bananas because it seems completely left field. So, probably already laughing, you pick the one that seems most likely to drive people towards the proper culprit. Two factions - one liberal, one fascist - vie for control and Secret Hitler (portrayed as a lizard for some reason) stands poised to make a bid for power. If you answered yes then don’t be surprised if I decline your invitations to come and play PlayStation with you! Each player will get a badge token, four “means of murder” cards and four “key evidence” cards which they display in front of themselves in sight of the whole table.Each turn, a group is sent out on a quest, but some of them are secretly traitors with the power to sabotage the mission. Either it’s the correctly accused murderer trying to direct the light of inquiry on to someone else or it’s a falsely accused investigator trying to reflect it onto the person they think is the murderer. The Resistance has mission results, which provide some information, but the meat of the social deduction is in the conversation of who to take on missions and the subsequent voting.

It also hurts whatever anemic possibilities there are for a social deduction metagame because now there’s no play in trying to hide and stay quiet as the murderer. How much fun you will find in the box is entirely dependant on the group you play with, the more creative the better. Her crowd liked social games but had gotten complacent with Cards Against Humanity, and it had become stale.Apart from the forensic scientist, each player is then given four red clue cards and four blue means cards, that they have face up in front of them. Their hope is that they can direct them towards the murderer along with the correct clue and correct weapon.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong gets away from this by changing the goal from implicating a person, to implication an inanimate combination of cards. Except, of course, you don’t have the necessary clues to do that and so everything you end up doing will likely make things worse.Both of these things could easily bring some bad feelings to some social deduction games but I love the way that Deception has tried to navigate around this.