Murdle The Game

‘Murdle: A Board Game‘ is a spin-off from the incredibly successful puzzle books by G. T. Karber. It feels like a modern version of Cluedo, but with a logic puzzle twist. As someone who has enjoyed logic puzzles since childhood and grew up playing Cluedo (my Dad’s favourite board game), this spoke to me on many levels, and I’m pleased to say it didn’t disappoint.

What’s the story?

‘Murdle: A Board Game‘ is a logic puzzle murder mystery, using the people, places and items familiar to regular Murdlers. Don’t worry if you’ve not completed the book puzzles though, there’s no pre-learning needed for the game. If you’re not familiar with logic puzzles and how they work, you basically follow clues to put ticks and crosses in boxes, until you reach a conclusion. (For example, if Major Red is in New Aegis that gets a tick, but he can’t be in the other locations, so they get crosses. Also, this means the other characters can’t be in New Aegis, so you can put a cross in all of those boxes as well.) If you are a logic puzzle newbie, the game itself suggests playing an open teamwork style game to start with, so you get used to how the game mechanics work.

What’s in the box?

Inside the box is a well-made game, with everything you need to pick up and play (apart from a pen or pencil). The board itself is a fold-out logic grid, with the fourth quarter numbered for the evidence folders. This is the big difference to traditional murder mystery games like Cluedo; players don’t have cards, they are in folders you can look at, and there isn’t one envelope with the final answer in, one of the folders will have a guilty card in (but I’ll explain more about this shortly). There are tick and cross counters to place on the board as you build your evidence, as well as small cards with the character names, place names and weapons on, which you can place around the board to help you remember who or what each picture represents. The evidence cards themselves are colour-coded with tabs on top, so they’re easy to pull out individually during the game. There are cards in a separate deck, but these link to your available actions during the game, not the evidence itself (again, I’ll explain more later). There’s also the player notepad, which is a logic puzzle grid with additional boxes for notes when you look in the folders. This is well designed and an essential tool to play the game. The one small snag is there is only one pad for a 2-4 player game, so you will need to rip sheets off for everyone (not a major issue, but a small irritation for me). My favourite element, however, is the genius card shields for each player to place around their notepad sheets. These simple additions keep your game secret (without having to do the school arm around your work thing) and they have reminders of what actions you can take written inside, so you don’t have to constantly refer to the rule book. They’re only a small part of the game, but I love them!

Ready to solve the crime?

After completing the set-up, each player is allowed to look at 2 cards to start their own logic grid evidence sheet. The clever twist comes next – to gain evidence, you have to share evidence, and you MUST be truthful. If you share something you know for certain (e.g. cards you’ve seen together in a folder), you place the relevant ticks and crosses on the board and earn the opportunity to look in another folder. If you share something you know is certainly a cross on the grid (e.g. someone cannot be in a given location), you place the relevant cross on the grid and pick up a card. These cards will tell you what you can look at to gain evidence – it might say S in in a blue circle and W in a red circle, meaning you can look at a Suspect card in one folder and a Weapon card in another. Players take it in turns to share and gain evidence until someone is ready to make an accusation. Like classic Cluedo, they declare who they believe did the murder, with what and where, before secretly checking the folder they believe contains these 3 cards and the black “guilty” card. If they’re correct, they show the cards and win the game. If they’re incorrect, they replace them, and the game carries on without them.

So, who did it?

‘Murdle: A Board Game’ is great fun and a clever way of making the books multiplayer and interactive in a new way. There are online puzzles that use the character, weapon and location clues for a single-player expansion option, as well as a secret extra puzzle hidden within the game. (I even contacted the author himself to ask for help with that one!) It has great replayability and it would be a crime for you to miss out.