Four Suspects (2016)

Overview

One murder. Four Suspects. And everyone claims to have an alibi.

Four Suspects offers 30 minutes of deep deduction. Each of four suspects claim to have been at a certain location at a certain time, and each alibi is represented by a card. At the beginning of the game these 16 cards are shuffled and one is put away. This is the missing alibi that needs to be identified, and the remaining cards are divided between the players.

Players takes turn choosing one of three available interrogation cards from the middle of the table. The chosen card lets you ask one other player for information about their cards. Questions are in the form of "How many cards do you have showing either the park or the shopping mall?", "How many cards do you have showing the young woman?", and so on.

In a 2-player game each has two hotel rooms with 3 or 4 guests. All questions only concern the occupants of one room.

Each time a player is asked a question they receive 1 coin. Coins can be used to hire the help of assistants, which provides special abilities, like the ability to lie, to avoid showing cards, take another turn and so on.

This coin mechanism balances a problem of many deduction games, that the player being asked more questions are generally at a disadvantage. The assistants also make sure the players have to combine different kinds of information while trying to deduce the missing alibi, making "4 suspects" a challenging game for deduction game lovers.

The game components are language independent.