The Cleaner won the following awards in the 2018 Solitaire Print and Play Contest:
1st place, Best Regular Print and Play Build
2nd place, Best Rule Book
3rd place, Most Thematic Game
4th place, Best Resource Management Category
7th place, Best Overall Game
9th place, Best Graphic Design
Janine Viglietti
1st place, Best Artist
Martin Gonzalvez
3rd place, Best New Designer
You are the Cleaner. Your goal is to clean as much evidence as possible from each crime scene, before the police arrive. You bring equipment to each crime scene, and use your equipment to generate effort, with which you clean evidence tiles from the crime scene. The more evidence you are able to clean, the less chance you give the police to catch you.
The Cleaner is a game of playing cards to generate Effort cubes. You may then place Effort cubes on Evidence spaces, or combine lower-value Effort cubes to create higher-value Effort cubes. Once all spaces on an Evidence Tile have been assigned an appropriate Effort cube, you may remove that Evidence Tile from the play area. Each action you perform takes some time off the clock. You must play your Equipment cards as efficiently as you can, to cover as many Evidence spaces as possible.
At the end of each stage, the police will conduct an investigation of the crime scene. For each unoccupied Evidence space, the police will have a greater chance of finding any Evidence you left behind. Successfully clean all the crime scenes to win the game.
—description from the publisher