If you don’t mind, I’ll take a break from past ruminations on third-party voting, COVID, and the goals of liberalism, and instead will recommend to you something that has given us hours of distraction and enjoyment through 2020’s interminable summer.
As you might have guessed from this post’s headline, it’s a game. Of sorts.
It’s not a classic board game—you can only play it once and there is no board—and it’s not an “escape room” type game, either. Rather, it’s a mashup of puzzles and ciphers, clues and characters, documents and artifacts, all wrapped in a murder mystery for you to solve in a month-by-month collection of physical and virtual communication.
It is Hunt-A-Killer, and it is a ton of fun.
My wife is not a big board-game fan (alas), which means our list of mutual at-home-during-lockdown activities doesn’t include the closet of board games I have accreted over the years. She is, however, a fan of murder mysteries, especially those of the classic whodunit variety (extra points if it’s British), so when I saw the advert for Hunt-A-Killer’s “crate” style DIY detective experience, I figured it might create an intersection in the Venn diagram of our otherwise separated interest sets.
How it Works
I opted for the subscription model. Each month, we receive a smallish box pertaining to an ongoing mystery. Within are documents, clippings, reports, letters, and physical objects that serve as clues to a murder. We, taking on the role of sub-contracted or junior detectives, study the contents, make our conclusions, and report by email to our client/boss. A reply comes back either with a gentle nudge in the proper direction (if our conclusion was incorrect) or an affirmation of our exemplary work. Every month, we get another box that adds new information to the investigation.
Subscriptions are month-by-month or annual, and allow an expedited option, like when we were one “episode” from the conclusion and didn’t want to wait a whole month, we took advantage of the “Ship it NOW” option. Alternatively, if patience isn’t one of your virtues, you can buy a boxed set which has the whole shebang in one go.
What You Get
The physical evidence and documentation in each installment is exemplary in quality and content. The look and even the feel of the items (like the “typewritten” document, where you can feel the embossed letters where the typebars “struck” the paper) helps you immerse yourself in the theme and milieu surrounding the crime.
Each installment is also supplemented by a “virtual desktop” provided by your main contact, a website you log into, where you can not only review transcripts of what came in your crate (in case you can’t read the unclear and/or cursive handwriting), but also inspect new documents that provide additional (often crucial) information.
Each installment has more information that is needed to complete the task at hand, but each installment also builds on the last one, adding layer upon layer. In our last crate, for instance, I had an aha! moment when a code we deciphered referred to a small, seemingly irrelevant piece of information we received three months ago. Seriously, I was living that moment near the end of the show when the detective smacks their forehead and says, “Of course!” before diving into the box of old letters they were given back at the start of the hour.
How It’s Solved
One caveat: At least in the mystery we’ve been working this summer (“Curtain Call,” a cold case from 1934) , there are a lot of ciphers to be decoded. The virtual desktop comes with assistance on those fronts, describing the different types of ciphers and how they are used and, to be fair, you are given everything you need to decode them. But if ciphers frustrate you no end, I would recommend either you partner up with someone who loves them or, failing that, you might want to give this a pass.
But don’t expect this to be an impenetrable mystery that can be solved only by a Sherlock or Dupin, where the clues make sense to us mortals only in retrospect. From the get-go, you’ll have suspicions. Some will be correct and others will prove to be false as more information trickles in (which is all part of the fun). And while some of the aspects of the case will seem a bit unrealistic (I mean, how often do folks really encrypt their messages to others?), it’s no more loony than watching as Jessica Fletcher discovers yet another corpse every twenty minutes.
This is a great activity for parents and their kids, too (older kids, of course), in that everyone can read the docs, handle the objects, and chime in with their thoughts. This last installment, my wife noticed an engraving I missed. Earlier, I twigged on a clue in the embroidery of a handkerchief we received. In this way Hunt-A-Killer is like the best “escape room” games, where more eyes and more brains on the problem make the solving that much easier.
We’ll be wrapping up our first, six-installment mystery in a week or so. I have a pretty good idea of the who and how, but I’m still unsure of the why, at this point. And, of course, I’ll have to prove it all, before we deliver our summation.
Loads of interesting, intriguing, immersive fun.
k
Wow! What a great way to sharpen your brain with this challenging puzzle. What about your neighbor? Have you guys developed your game project so that you can sell it and become millionaires?????
LikeLike
LOL! Our game project went into hiatus when we went into lockdown. We were in the head-scratching, brainstorming phase, where we really needed to be in the same room, riffing on ideas. I suppose we could still do that, but frankly, neither of us has had the “oomph” to restart the process. While I don’t expect to make my first million off of it, I would like to complete the project, though. Might be time to dust that off and jump-start the effort. Good reminder!
LikeLiked by 1 person