Alone Against the Boredom

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a game that was on my wishlist for quite some time. The Shut up and Sit Down review sold me on it but I wasn’t sure that my usual board gaming group (a lovely bunch of Normies who dabble in nerdom once every couple of months for an evening) would go for. Buying it just for me when it has no replay value always seemed too self-indulgent but a flash sale in December 2019 brought it down to around £20 so I picked it up. A few weeks later, our Sunday Pathfinder game found itself short of players (and most importanly the GM!) and so SHCD hit the table for the first time for the three people who made it.

SHCD is simple to play. You have a map of London, a directory or names and businesses and copies of The Times. You are given a case to solve, moving from place to place, chasing down leads and interviewing victims, witnesses and suspects. There’s a lot of reading (out loud if playing with others) but it is wonderfully thematic. Once you think you’ve solved the mystery, the back of the casebook has a series of questions for you to answer (and get points for correct answers). Then Sherlock Holmes explains what happened and how he solved it. For each step you took more than him you deduct 5 points (or gain them if you take fewer… I don’t know that is possible as the smug bastard is hella good but it is in the rules). Then you compare your points to Sherlock’s default score of 100.

We loved out first case. In fact, we had so much fun reading out passages, speculating on the suspects and coming up with conspiracies based on newspaper articles that we didn’t really care about our end score. It was similar to a GM-less RPG, we made our own subplots and had a ball as it unfolded. We left the session raving about the game and promising that we’d complete the other 9 cases in the box togther. We didn’t get to schedule a second session before lockdown hit and the game has been waiting ever since.

Given that the world fell apart and it was clear we wouldn’t be to all meet togther for the forseeable future, neither of them would have blamed me for playing on alone however a promise is a promise so I also waited… until the newest stand alone box game out and I had some Christmas money to spend! Say hello to the Baker’s Street Irregulars casebook.

The day it arrived, I rushed through my to do list, ate an early dinner, made a pot of tea and settled down to tackle my first case by the light of the Christmas tree and some suitably atmospheric candles. I began by reading the paper for the opening case to get a feel for the setting again and then cracked open the case of the Curzon Street Kidnapping. Wendy Sturton was kidnapped in broad daylight, held captive overnight and then released after the randsom wasn’t paid. She comes to Holmes for help in capturing her assailants as the police seem unconcerned.

Over the next two hours, I ran around Victorian London, tracking leads and uncovering a case that was more than it first appeared. The game does an excellent job of giving you all the clues you need but still making you feel clever for piecing it all together. The moments when the next thread is revealed or a hitherto unknown motive is glimpsed feel like true “A-ha! The game is afoot Watson!” moments. By the end of the case, I had uncovered a web of connected events and solved the mystery (and scored a reasonable 75 points). I took notes along the way and, though I won’t post them here so as not to spoil the case, I filed them away in the box like a detective wrapping up my paperwork and closing the manilla folder at the end of a job well done.

There looks to be more of a connection between the cases in this box that the original one and the desire to race onto the next case is strong. I’m going to try and space them out through – with only ten cases in the box, I’d rather make it last a couple of months than burn through it all in a fortnight.