Phil Walker-Harding has been busy this year, with at least five brand-new titles I can think of hitting the U.S. market as well as the redesign of the 2006 game Fjords (originally someone else’s) and a new Adventure Games entry. One of the new games is Museum Suspects, which is kind of just the kids’ deduction game Outfoxed redone as a game for slightly older kids, with a fun deduction element but a huge random factor that makes it hard to play it well.
In Museum Suspects, you build the central board by placing tiles showing sixteen animals with different, ridiculous outfits on in a 4×4 grid, and players will peek at clues to try to eliminate some of those suspects to figure out which one(s), if any, committed a robbery at the museum. There are eight different clue types that differ each game; during setup, you’ll pick one of the four clue cards from each category and place them face down along the sides of the board in random order. Some clues tell you to eliminate an entire row or column, or a quadrant, while others tell you to eliminate all suspects with a hat or a scarf of a certain color. The game lasts six rounds, so you don’t get to see all the clues, and requires that you place a token on a suspect in every round.
On your turn, you choose a clue you want to look at. If it has no investigation tokens on it, you just get to look, but if it already has a token on it, you must have a token of equal or higher value to be able to look at it. After you’ve peeked, you place one of your numbered investigation tokens on the clue, making sure it’s at least the same value as the highest token that was already on it. You’ll marking off several squares on your personal scoresheet to eliminate up to four more suspects for each clue. Afterwards, you place another of your investigation tokens on one of the suspects on the board. If that suspect turns out to be one of the guilty parties, you will receive that many points at game-end. If you believe that none of the sixteen is guilty, you can place a token on the Emergency Exit tile to try to gain points for that outcome instead.
After six rounds, you reveal all eight clues and all players jointly flip over suspect tiles as the clues eliminate them. Then you hand out points based on the values of players’ investigation tiles on the remaining suspects – a player may place more than one such tile on a suspect, just doing so on different turns – and determine who has the highest total. There’s no tiebreaker, but it’s possible for nobody to win if you all guessed wrong.
The core mechanic here is almost identical to the deduction part of Outfoxed, which is a very fun cooperative game for kids as young as 5. To distinguish itself and play well with older kids, Museum Suspects really needed to do something different beyond making it a competitive game. If we knew which clue type was in which location, for example, you could plan which clues to target – you might see that looking at the clue showing one type of animal would be more fruitful than looking at the clue about a type of hat. Instead, it’s just random, and so are your choices – and you have no idea whether it’s worth going after a certain clue with one of your stronger investigation tokens. The game also isn’t great with two players, because the small competitive aspect of the investigation tokens on the clue cards doesn’t work – you can more or less avoid each other’s clues and tokens, and neither of you will have any incentive to use your more valuable ones on clue cards.
Museum Suspects just misses the mark for me; I’d actually rather play Outfoxed, even though that’s clearly a game for younger players. This game doesn’t let you develop any sort of strategy, and even in a game for ages 8+, that’s a minimum requirement. You could house-rule it, where you know what clue is placed in each location, following the precise order that’s shown in the rulebook (which isn’t meant to dictate their placement – I asked Walker-Harding and he confirmed). I judge games as is, though, and I didn’t think this one worked.