Day 6 - Deception Murder in Hong Kong

I'm convinced Deception is a good game, I just don't play it with the right group. In Deception Murder in Hong Kong players are creating a narrative together about a murder. One player is the Murderer, one player is the Forensic Scientist and eveyone else is Investigators. Each player has 4 means cards and 4 clue cards in front of them and the Murderer secretly points to one of each while only the Forensic Scientist is watching. Then the players try and work out who the murder is and how they did the murdering.

That's where the Forensic Scientist comes in, they have 6 tiles that help them explain details found at the scene, guiding the players towards the murderer. After they are done placing out their clues each player can posit a guess or an accusation, although a wrong accusation will take you out of the game. Then the Forensic Scientist does one more clue, players guess or accuse and then they finally do one last clue.

And this is the first problem with Deception. It feels quiet lob-sided for gameplay. 6 clues are given before the first guess, but then just one more clue is added before everyone guesses again. And sometimes the clues are just not helpful, but because they are random you can't control them. For example the murder weapon was poison and the clue tile you drew was Time of Day, well that's not really going to move the game along.

Regardless of the mechanics of the game though, whether or not Deception is going to work for you is entirely dependant on the group. The guess phase should be a group of people telling stories about how they think the murder was accomplished with nuance and detail, but mechanically all you need to do is say "I think it was Dave with the Kitchen Knife and the Bag of Rice." And unfortunately the latter is more the way my group went when we played recently.

We also only played with 5, which is really the bare minimum you need for a game of Deception and means you play without the Accomplice so the Murderer doesn't have a way to easily divert suspicion from themselves.

For lower player counts there are more fun social deduction/hidden role games, like Don't Mess With Cthulhu or Citadels or for limited communication games Mysterium.