Perspectives – the Information-sharing investigation game (spoiler free)

• Designers: Dave Neale and Matthew Dunstan
• Publisher: Space Cowboys
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 12+
• Time: 90 min per case, 3 cases included in the box
• Amazon Affiliate Link – https://amzn.to/3Ss45yz

In Perspectives, each player holds key information for piecing together what has happened and finding the solution.

• Three cases, each in four acts.
• Cross-reference photographs, reports, and clues… without looking at the documents of your team players!
• Will you find the details connecting all the pieces of the puzzle?

WORK TOGETHER TO SOLVE THE CASES!

The three scenarios:

• THE NAGARAJA – CASE 1: India – Museum – Theft
• THE DREGS – CASE 2: California – Rock music – Poison
• FROM BUENAVISTA WITH LOVE – CASE 3: South America – Gangs – Murders

When you open the box, you’ll find that you don’t really get much in the way of rules. Instead, there is an introductory case here which will walk you through how things work in the game.  You are told to put the game box on the table and players should sit so that they can see at least one side of the box but never more than two sides.

You then read the introductory paragraph to the story and you are given two questions to try to answer.  Players are then allows to examine the art on the box and when players feel ready to discuss, the box top is put back on and the questions are discussed and answered.

Yeah, that’s not a lot to go on – but the designers want you to explore the game this way, and I’m not going to spoil anything.  In the game, players will have to describe things they’ve seen – the level of detail is up to you; make sure you include enough to get the message across, but not so much to drown out the signal with noise.  Players will have to pay a lot of attention to what they are seeing.  Players will have to listen to these descriptions carefully.  Both sides will have to figure out what is important and what isn’t.  

So, as you play the game, you open up the envelope and distribute the cards as directed.  Then, each player gets to describe what they have on the cards and hopefully the group can combine the information together to make a cohesive picture.  In each chapter, one card can be shared so that everyone can see, and there are ways to share more cards – though it might cost you in the “scoring”.  

You do get some preliminary questions to start each chapter, and when you think you’ve gained all the information you can, you open up the sheet in the envelope to get the final questions for said chapter.  The group can discuss those questions and then give the answers, and then you flip the sheet over to see if you got those right.

Move onto the next chapter and continue.  The final chapter of the case will then use all of the cards from the first three chapters and you get even more questions.

My thoughts on the game

I have had an ever changing opinion of these investigative games since they hit the market.   

The key here is communication – trying to describe what you see in front of you and verbally putting the clues together.  This has always been a frustrating technique for my brain – I don’t like this sort of artificial barrier of not being able to show you the card.  If there is no restriction on what I can tell you, why can’t I just show you the card? 

Of course, the description of the card contents is the crux of the game, and frankly, without this bit, there isn’t a lot here.  It would just be like any other puzzle hunt game where you dump out the contents and solve it – and let’s face it, there are hundreds of those.  In Perspectives, the players have to actively curate the information and try to only share what’s important.  They also have to be perceptive enough to figure out what the important information actually is!

I will mention that the example game was a little confusing, and it uses a slightly different format than the actual cases.  I think it’s safe to say that it uses the interior box as a way to give clues.  We had a frustrating time with the example case, much more so than with the real case.  So, I’d definitely caution people not to be turned off from the example.  By the time you have played the example, you obviously already have the whole box in your hands, so just use it as a way to learn the mechanics and then move onto the first chapter of the first case.  Don’t let that initial example frustrate you too much.

The artwork is pretty great, and as with many Space Cowboys puzzle games, there is an exquisite amount of detail in the illustrations, and this detail is often central to the puzzle.  Be sure to look at everything that you get and closely examine it.   The answer to each chapter is always right in front of you, in “plain sight”, though you will definitely have to work together to tease out the right details from the distractions.

The quality of the puzzles is hit-or-miss for me. Some of the chapters felt very rewarding, in the sense that we were able to work together to come up with a pattern of clues to answer the question.  Other chapters felt like… a visual Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.  By which I mean, we just stumbled around, maybe were able to guess the right answer – but then when we read the full solution, it feels impossible for us to have found all of the clues (which were admittedly all on the cards) on our own.  To be fair to the game, that could all be group dependent – a more attentive group might have seen the crucial detail and had a much different experience.

So, how to review this?  It’s a puzzle game.  If you like solving puzzles/mysteries, this could be for you.  Have you played other related games?  If you lean more towards the Unlock games than the Exit games, this could be for you.  Do you like having everything in front of you at once?  If so, this is definitely not the game for you. 

In the crowded puzzle genre, there are a lot of current entries, and each has its own style.  Hopefully I’ve been able to describe enough about how the game works (again, not really able to give any specifics for spoiler-y reasons) for you to figure out whether this one is right for you!

Amazon Affiliate Link – https://amzn.to/3Ss45yz

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor