Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Sherlock 13, or What One Man Can Invent Another Can Discover

A bevy of games featuring Sherlock Holmes have been released in the past few years from publishers around the world — let's call it the "Cumberbatch effect" — and naturally most of them feature deduction in some form. One of the purest — shall we say, elementary? — deduction designs in this group is Hope S. Hwang's Sherlock 13, originally released as Holmes 13 in 2013 by Magpie and now reissued by BoardM Factory with art by the seemingly ever-present Vincent Dutrait.

I recorded an overview of the game at SPIEL 2015, and now in the run-up to its presence in three-dimensional form at SPIEL 2016, here's a look at the finished production.

Designer Diary: Colony — A Strategy Game

Sep 27, 2016

In the middle of 2015, Doug Garrett (of Garrett's Games and Geekiness) mentioned the Japanese game Age of Craft to me. He had just played it at his West Coast MeepleFest invitational (brought by...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Goths Save the Queen, or Scatter Her Enemies and Make Them Fall

Sep 26, 2016

If ever I suspected a game of originating from a title, it's Goths Save the Queen, which sounds like a name created by bored high schoolers, but as folks like Reiner Knizia and Magic: The...

Designer Diary: Germania Magna: Border in Flames, or Rome Is Falling!

Sep 25, 2016

Germania Magna: Border in Flames was supposed to be published in 2015 by Wydawnictwo Alter. This didn't happened, but we heard stories about it, saw the artwork, played the game...and we couldn't...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Garden of Minions, or Three Shall Be the Number Thou Shalt Count

Sep 24, 2016

Kuro, who self-publishes games under the label Manifest Destiny, creates games that — despite having few components or rules — are complicated to play, most notably with The Ravens of Thri...

Game Preview: Conan, Unchained and Unboxed

Sep 23, 2016

Frédéric Henry's Conan from Monolith is a massive beast of a game, made even larger when funded on Kickstarter to the tune of $3.3 million, and now nearly a year after the original expected...