Which Deduction Game Is For You

I love solving mysteries, I enjoy watching crime dramas, and reading Agatha Christie and related fiction. So as a kid growing up, I loved a puzzle book, I loved Cluedo and this is something that has not dimmed as I have grown older. Once I discovered the arena of deduction games, I was hooked. These games involve you deducing information and solving the puzzle of the game. They take a large amount of different forms, and so here is a handy guide to help guide you to the best Deduction game selection for you.

Those Who Love Wordle & Want A Solo-able Rich Experience

Wordle took the world by storm during lockdown and we were all racking our brains to think of the best five letter words that would allow us to get the secret word in less than 6 guesses. Now I am not really one for word games, but I did love the wordle craze, even upping my skills to quordle and octordle too. Something that I took to in a very similar way, not least because there is an app that generates a daily challenge, is Turing Machine. This 2022 release takes a punch card analogue computer and makes it into quite possibly the most jaw droppingly clever game.

The aim of this game is to crack a three number code first. You create a three number code by placing three punch cards together, and then you ask three questions using this proposal of the game to deduce different pieces of information. You place your proposal code over the verifier card which will display you either a red cross or a green tick. This scrap of information will get you one step closer to cracking the code. This game has you racking your brains trying to use logic to determine the best verifiers to use and the best way to get the most information quickly. My favourite thing about this game though is there are millions of puzzles available on the app, and also a daily puzzle that you can complete too, either solo or multiplayer.

Those Who Love Space & Want A Smooth Experience

If you love sci-fi, stargazing or indeed anything space related, then I have the perfect thing for you, The Search For Planet X. This is a game where you are scientists looking for planet X, trying to determine in which sector of the sky the elusive planet is hiding.

During the deduction game you will take turns to scan the sky and ask a question about something present in a particular group of sectors. The smaller the amount of sectors that you select to scan, the more your pawn will move forward around the outside. This will mean that it will be longer until you get your next turn, as the turns are determined similarly to in Patchwork, whereby the person at the back goes next. There are logic rules that will help you to determine additional information, for example that there are four asteroids either arranged in two pairs or a band in four adjacent sectors.

You can upgrade the difficulty by reducing the amount of information you start with, you can also seriously upgrade the difficulty by moving from 12 sectors to a whopping 18 sectors in the sky. You can also play multiplayer games where players have different difficulty levels to allow more evenly matched games between new and experienced players.

Those Who Love Art, Dixit & Cooperation

If you like whimsical art like that found in Dixit and Detective Club, then can I suggest to you Mysterium Park? This is the smaller box version of the original game Mysterium, and takes that gameplay and streamlines it into a smoother experience.

In the deduction game Mysterium Park, one player is a silent “ghost” player, and the rest of the players are a co-operative band of psychics brought in to solve the murder. During this game you will be trying to work out who killed the ghost character and where. Set in a spooky fairground, the player who plays the ghost will be providing vision cards to the psychic players to try and nudge them by colour/shape/object association into the right direction. These vision cards will have abstract art on them, things like an iron in the dessert with a dining chair and a bunch of balloons. You will be trying to get into the mind of your fellow player as they will only have a limited number of cards to work with so their clues will be less than optimal. You'll have to use your imagination, and that is where the fun comes in.

We love the fact that you can work together in this deduction game to try to decipher what the ghost player is trying to get across. I managed to play this game as a team building exercise for work successfully over video call which really was well received. This game is an event rather than just a game for us, and we really love to step outside our usual strategic science-brain box and try out something new.

Those Who Love Cluedo * True Crime Dramas

For those amongst you who are devouring Criminal Minds and NCIS on the daily and who have fond memories of playing Cluedo as a kid then I have two suggestions for you. If you have a family of non-gamers then I can suggest Cluedo, either the original, junior version or else the themed versions (Scooby-Doo, Rick and Morty and Batman amongst others). However many of you are probably wanting a lot more than Cluedo can offer, and I have the ideal solution for you which is Awkward Guests.

Awkward Guests uses a deck creation system to create a unique deck of clue cards for each game. Similarly to Cluedo you will be passing clues between one another based on questions you ask about different suspects, weapons and/or locations. There is significantly more to this than Cluedo, you can have accomplices in your crime as well as the fact that people lie, especially guilty ones! You will be racing against your fellow investigators to piece together details about the crime, and mark off your information on your A4 sheet. There is also an app supported solo game which I think really ramps up the difficulty as you only have a limited number of action points with which to solve the puzzle. As yet I have not managed to do anything beyond the easy difficulty successfully, but I reckon with time and practice, I can get there and hone my skills for a win. There is a lot of mileage in this game for us, an evergreen.

Those Who Love To Be Passive Aggressive

Sometimes you and your family disagree on things, and occasionally things get a bit heated as you struggle to understand where your significant other is coming from when they have told you that pizza is the devil’s food rather than the best thing ever. Or some other ridiculous opinion they harbour. What about if instead of this being something that you silently seethe about for a few hours, you get this out in the open and play a game where you need to work together to decorate a home, but using very limited information?

Decorum offers you just that, you and your fellow players will be working together to try and decorate the house in a way that will please all players. You will have to create a combination of wall paint, lamps, wall hangings and curios (weird objects). These can be in yellow, blue, red or green, and the items come in themes as well; modern, antique, retro, and unusual. The twist is that no one player has all of the rules, you must work together to solve the puzzle and please everyone. Each player will have their own objectives that must be obeyed, perhaps you need to have no green in the bathroom, someone else can only have green downstairs, and perhaps no retro pieces anywhere in the house. During the game you will be adding or replacing one item on your turn, and your fellow players will be responding with “love it”, “hate it”, “it’s fine”. From that teenage-esque response, you will be trying to determine what their objectives are, You win the game by all having your objectives met in the house. Making a house a home is of course a lesson in compromise, but everyone needs to have their needs met in the Decorum house. There is no pulling rank over the kids just because you’re an adult and “you pay for this house”. If you and your family want to make light of the struggles of cohabiting, then this is the game for you!

Hopefully this Deduction game list will help you to pick the best deduction game for you, alternatively if this is the game genre you love, like me, then perhaps you’ll just have to try them all!