Detective Club Review – How To Find A Fake Art Critique

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Mysterium and its slimmed-down successor, Mysterium Park. Trying to communicate through surreal artwork always makes for a fun time. So when I heard about Detective Club being a competitive version of these games, I knew I had to play it.

Detective Club is not only competitive, but it adds social deduction to the picture card formula. With secret roles handed out at the start of each round, it’s up to you to find out who’s who.

Before that happens though, the Active Player starts the round.

If that’s you, then look at your hand of weird but beautiful picture cards and come up with a clue. Importantly, this one-word should describe two of your cards to a tee. Once you’ve got it, write that clue on a notebook for every player, except for one – which you’ll leave blank.

After shuffling and distributing these paper pads, the player with the elevated heart rate and empty notebook is the Conspirator. It’s their job to hide their identity for the rest of the round. Meanwhile, everyone else is a Detective, tasked with finding out who the Conspirator is.

Starting with the Active Player, everyone gets two turns to put down cards matching the clue, or as close to matching as you can get.

Once everyone has two cards in front of them, it’s time to explain your choices. Again, this starts with the clue giver, who announces the clue and then explains why they picked the cards they did.

As the Conspirator, this is when you start sweating. Because you have to explain away the reason your cards don’t match everyone else’s.

When everyone has had their say, players put their magnifying glass token on whoever they think is the Conspirator. Once all guesses are in, roles are revealed and scoring takes place. Detectives who guessed the Conspirator correctly get 3 points. Meanwhile, the Conspirator and Active Player only gain points if zero or a single Detective guessed correctly.

Now that scoring is done, everyone replenishes their cards and the next player becomes the Active player. Give everyone a turn at giving a clue before counting up all points and declaring a winner.

Help is on the way

With all of these picture-based games, like Dixit and Muse, the artwork is a large draw. Detective Club is no slouch in this area. The cards are gorgeous and vary from the surreal to the extremely bizarre. Often scoring laughs from players before the game even begins.

That’s not all there is to Detective Club. It’s also the best social deduction game I’ve played.

One of the smartest things Detective Club does is reduce accusations to the act of placing a magnifying glass in front of another player. This altogether removes the finger-pointing and emotional damage that plagues the genre.

It also understands that you’re not James Bond, and trying to hide your identity isn’t within most players’ skill sets. So it gives the Conspirator a lot of help.

First, by incentivising the Active Player to create clues that help the Conspirator. After all, they only get points if the Conspirator gets away with it. So instead of clues that would weed out the player with the empty notebook. You get these hilariously aimless clues like “daydream”, or “envy” where with the magic of interpretation, any card can fit.

The second way Detective Club helps out the Conspirator is by limiting how the players can express themselves. It’s rare to get the perfect card for a clue, and rarer still to get two of them in one hand.

Meaning it all comes down to players explaining their actions. And no matter how strong you think the link is between the clue and your chosen cards. Explaining it to others always devolves into the crazed chattering of a conspiracy theorist.

Look guys, OK, I didn’t have the best hand but if you turn this card upside down. Then this bucket on a mop looks like it’s full. Which is exactly what the clue carpe diem means. Live life to the fullest.

Actual defence of a poorly chosen card.

Needs a web app, not a phone app

When you’re not the Conspirator, Detective Club excels at making you think everyone else is. By limiting hand sizes, and giving people picture cards, the game gives people enough rope to tie themselves up.

As such, it puts you in the oh-so-fun position of thinking you know who it is but then when roles are revealed you find out you’re well off the mark. This grand reveal is hilarious. And with the rounds being so short, it’s never too long between reveals.

Now, if there is one pain point with Detective Club it’s the writing out clues in each of the notebooks. Depending on your handwriting speed this can take a while. Especially, if your clue is antidisestablishmentarianism. However, to help with this, IGAMES developed a mobile application to distribute the clue and remove the notebooks altogether.

This is awesome, except to get it to work you need everyone at the table to install the app. In this day and age, that’s an uphill battle. In hindsight, I really wished they went the web app route like how Jack Box Games does with Jackbox.tv.

The other small issue with Detective Club is it doesn’t change with the player count. So when playing with more players, it becomes a lot harder to guess who the Conspirator is. This is hard to do with 5 players, it’s darn near impossible when you’re playing with 8.

Regardless, it’s still a great time. Much like Would I Lie to You, while winning is the goal the fun is in the crazy yarns people are willing to tell to sell their cards.

As such, Detective Club has overtaken Deception: Murder in Hong Kong as my favourite social deduction game. If you ever wanted to dip your toes in the genre, it’s a great place to start.