Honestly, Letters From Whitechapel is a better design of the same concept.
For detective story games, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is amazing.
And for public transit games, Bus is the way to go (probably)
Lol Sherlock Holmes consulting detective is probably fun as a single player game, but we played it as a party game (cause it said you could do that) and the result is just chaos.
We got on what we were pretty sure was the right track and got into some rabbit holes, brought it back to Sherlock and he basically told us to fuck off and die and we earned negative points. I think we got one part of one of his answers and didn’t even visit most of the places that would have given us at least a few answers.
Great for a laugh though.
I would say it should be fine as a solo game if you’re into that, but better as a 2-3 player game to have someone to discuss and bounce ideas against.
I can imagine that as a party game it would be chaotic for sure!
Definitely needs the right group, and I think you can’t take the scoring too seriously, especially playing in larger groups. Pretty sure I also have never had a positive score even in a smaller group.
Yeah that’s why I say it’s good for a laugh. If a game is nearly impossible to get a decent score in, it can’t been taking itself too seriously. You’re meant to sit back and watch the master Sherlock Holmes do his thing and nail the mystery. Often it’s fun and you get some “oh yeah” moments where he points out a detail that makes a lot of clues click, but sometimes the leaps in logic are just unhinged. Also there was another mystery I remember distinctly where in order to get the correct line, you had to have some random bit of trivia knowledge about Sherlock-era English style cause it was based on someone’s hat.
Now that I write this, I bet there’s a lot of fun bits for people who have read all of the Sherlock books and “get” the logic of that world.
