Crimes have been committed! Mystery is afoot! Views are… constrained! We are all a part of a crack team of crime solving detectives, but for some reason we can all only see part of the picture of what’s happened. Of course, if we work together and are effective at sharing what information we hold, we can solve the thing! It’s all about your Perspective.
2-6 Players | 1 Hour | Designed by Dave Neale and Matthew Dunstan
Last weekend I visited PAX Australia and was very fortunate to sit down with one half of the design team for Perspectives – Matt (yes, we are on nickname terms now) for a chat about his upcoming game and a play through of the first act of the first case. I made sure to clarify in advance how good Matt was at acting, as to play this game ‘properly’ he would have to do a very good job of convincing me he didn’t know every minute detail of every facet of the game inside and out. He assured me that he would do his best, that it certainly wasn’t his first time pretending to play his new game, and off we went.
Please don’t worry about spoilers when reading further, however I will mention some concepts introduced in the tutorial (but not the specific solution to that) when introducing the game.
The Premise
Perspectives is a mystery solving game, akin to something like an Exit escape room game mixed together with Macro Micro Crime City. To begin each act, a deck of large clue cards are split up between players. Each clue card contains information about the case to be solved, and players will need to have a good look through their cards and then start a discussion.
From the beginning, players are aiming to piece together a scene and sequence of events from the clues they have access to. The golden rule of the game is, you cannot show anyone your clues, you can only discuss them.
In the tutorial, players are given views of a house from a few different angles and different times. The game asks ‘whodunnit’ (there is a small blurb to set the scene and pose general questions). By discussing what they can see at the different time points and different views of the house, players will piece together a sequence of events that they will then take to the question round. At this point players hide all their clues, and then the game will ask a series of questions, e.g. ‘How was the crime committed?’, ‘How did the criminal escape?’ etc.
If players were observant and reconstructed a good model of what happened from the clues given, they will be able to answer all the questions provided and get a good score on the case.
Playing the Game
I will open this section by saying, I really do love this kind of game. Collaboratively solving puzzles of this nature with my friends is something I really enjoy, and I’ve played more Exit games than I can even remember at this point (seriously… I recently bought one it turned out I’d already played years ago). I went into this pretty much knowing I would like this game, but what I found when actually playing it surpassed expectations.
Matt opened the game by setting the scene with the beginning blurb. Then then we had a look at our cards, taking a minute to absorb the information provided (well, Matt spent a minute acting very much like he was). We then began the back and forth of sharing what we could see on our cards that seemed relevant, and then using those prompts to find more interesting things to eke out.
At this point I became very impressed with the design. It was obvious that a lot of care has been put into spreading the clues across players so that someone noticing one thing on their cards will prompt others to call out relevant information and travel through the chain of logic. Because other similar games aren’t designed to split up info in this way, they don’t really get to play out like that and I found that to be a particularly fun part of this game.
Despite playing with only 2 players, the back and forth was good. I’m not totally sure how much prodding Matt provided (depends how soon he wanted to get rid of me I guess) but I think his acting was pretty spot on and I did feel like we solved the case organically. It felt very rewarding to go through the questions at the end and (mostly) nail each one, and I can see how you might miss a detail that could cost you a few points at scoring time.
Chatting With Matt
After playing through the first act and earning my Detective Badge, I quizzed Matt about the design process of the game. Since the game design is primarily based around interpreting illustrations I was intrigued how the design, playtest and production process took place. Matt didn’t seem too offended that my question heavily insinuated that he was bad at drawing (though as we’ve established, he’s not half bad at acting) and he detailed the back and forth process between himself and the publisher, the publisher and illustrator, and what feedback he was able to give during the illustration process.
Matt initially designed a ‘demo’ scenario, illustrated himself. This provided the scaffolding to see what people thought of the idea (I think a lot of them suggested a professional artist) and essentially built out the game system. It was at this stage of the design he introduced the game to Dave to help strengthen the storytelling elements of the game. From there, with a robust game system, once the game was picked up by a publisher (a long story .. but this actually took like 5 years from pitch to ok) it was time to build out the cases with some amazing artwork!
With the solvability of a case being critically linked to what is contained in the illustrations, and a strong desire for no red herrings, Matt expressed that they were very happy with how the illustrators handled this requirement and were keen to work together iteratively to make sure each piece provided the correct information to the players.
Unfortunately at this point in the conversation Matt and I were distracted into discussions of less important things, mostly him mentioning a few times how he was a bit miffed he didn’t have a popular game under his belt, something such as The Guild of Merchant Explorers or like, a whole series of audio based mystery games. I’m not totally sure, I wandered off from Matt cause Phil Walker-Harding showed up with his hot new game My Shelfie.
Final Thoughts
As I’ve said, overall, I really like the concept and execution of this game. I see a small risk with the lack of replayability – if you totally blow a case, you only find out when you are seeing the answers, and then it’s too late to play again. Hopefully you would learn something for the next case.
I think one of the biggest factors of enjoyment with this game is the beautiful production and amazing art. I’m not showing off much it here since I don’t want to spoil anything, but each of the three stories has a different artist, and unique art style that fits the setting.
Perspectives is so accessible, there’s basically no rules, and it’s a very social game. It fits great into a bunch of different situations, party, game night, family. I’m really keen to play through the rest of the game with my group! The game will be released in coming weeks, keep an eye out for it in your local game shop!
The copy of Perspectives used for this article was provided to The Boardgame Detective by VR Distribution
The Boardgame Detective 