The answer is yes, it’s great, with a small caveat for younger players.

Get a clue

The basic premise of Secret Identity is to get the other players to guess your mystery person, while simultaneously trying to guess every other player’s identity. How do you do this? Pictures, dear friend.

At the start of the game, eight cards are placed face-up, next to a number from one to eight, each with the name of someone famous on them. It might be a real person or a fictional one. It could be a super-famous pop singer or a character from a TV programme like Game of Thrones. There are eight face-down keys up for grabs in the middle of the table, and everyone takes one before looking at it to see who their key’s number corresponds with.

Each player also has a stack of ten pictorial clue cards. They’re double-sided with a picture on either end, for a total of four potential clues per card. On your player board there’s a cardboard flap you can tuck cards behind. Some slots along this flap have red dots, some have green dots. You try to place your clues so that green means ‘this person is associated with this thing’, and red means ‘this person has nothing to do with this thing’.

So I might have Darth Vader as my secret identity, which means I tuck my card showing a dove of peace into the red slots, and another showing a spaceship in the green slots. On their own, maybe that’s not enough, but when compared to the other seven names on the table, it might be.

In a flap

The trick to making a party game stand out over any other is having some kind of gimmick, and Secret Identity’s gimmick is a winner. At the top of each player board, there are eight holes behind a hinged, magnetic flap. Your secret identity key goes in the first slot, and the flap covers the number on it. When it’s time to guess you pass the boards around and each person can take one of the numbered keys in their chosen colour and slot in the key with the number they think matches the clues.

Once the boards have gone around the group you get to have this wonderful moment of The Big Reveal, where each person gets to fold down the flap on their board and reveal the numbers on the keys. You get the great thing which makes a party game a winner, where half the table cheers while the other half groans.

Games like this always generate the most fun in my experience. Secret Identity, Just One, So Clover, Codenames, Mysterium – games where the person giving the clues gets a chance to explain their choices. These discussions are usually where most of the fun of the game comes from, and Secret Identity has it in spades.

Final thoughts

So Secret Idetity is a winner. At least, it is in my friend and family groups. It’s pretty easy to explain, and everyone gets it after a single round. The thing I particularly like is that the clues are all pictorial which removes language dependence, and also makes it more accessible for people who find reading small text hard. I didn’t realise the importance of this until I played Just One with my family over Christmas, and my dad had forgotten his glasses. He just couldn’t read the text on those cards, but managed just fine with black and white line art on these.

The biggest problem I found with the game is with younger players. My son is 11 now, and every time we sit down to play with him I have to discard a load of cards during setup, because they’re names of people and characters he has no knowledge of. Sometimes because they’re TV characters from things he hasn’t seen (kids these days seem to watch substantially more Youtube than TV and movies), and other times they’re singers, politicians or actors from well before his time.

Still, that’s a minor (pun not intended, but very welcome) problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s still a game he loves playing, and I can see him get excited every time he gets a chance to explain the (often very clever) reasoning behind his clues.

For less than 30 quid, it’s a winner in my book. I say this as someone who bought the game after playing someone else’s copy and knew right away that I needed a copy. You can pick it up at my partner store, Kienda, right here. Remember, if you’re signing up for a new account, you can get 5% off your first £60 spend by signing up here – kienda.co.uk/punchboard.

Secret Identity (2022)

Design: Johan Benvenuto, Alexandre Droit, Kévin Jost, Bertrand Roux
Publisher: Funnyfox
Art: Alain Boyer
Players: 3-8
Playing time: 20-40 mins

The post Secret Identity Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Logic is the beginning of knowledge, not the end”

The Search for Planet X is a logic & deduction game. As astronomers, you’re trying to find not only the location of the mysterious Planet X, but also a variety of other astronomical objects. Asteroids, comets, gas clouds, dwarf planets – they’re all out there, waiting to be found, and there are points on offer for the people who find them. Luckily, being the clever scientists you are, you have some clues as to where things might be. For example, you know that every asteroid is in a sector adjacent to another asteroid, you know that Planet X cannot be adjacent to a dwarf planet, etc.

There’s not enough information there to figure out where everything is, though, so how do you get more of it?

An app.

The game is driven by an app. There, I said it. App-haters look away now. I’ve got no problem with a game requiring an app, and in the case of The Search for Planet X, it’s a game which couldn’t exist without an app. When you take the various actions to search the skies for objects, you input those choices into the app, and it tells you what you find. It’s a very elegant and simple process which works well, as you’d hope.

As well as directly searching for things, you can choose to attend a conference as an action, which reveals some additional indirect information. It might tell you that a comet isn’t within three spaces of a dust cloud, or an asteroid is opposite a dwarf planet. Not much on its own, but when you combine it with the things you’ve crossed out or circled on your player sheet, then you’re starting to get somewhere. Now you’re on the path to winning.

Space race

Let’s get this out of the way now. The Search for Planet X is awesome. It’s very, very good. There are some caveats, of course. If you’re after action and you hate logical reasoning, you’re going to have a bad time with this game. It’s not a game you can come to with a hangover or after a heavy day at work, because you need the mental bandwidth to contend with the puzzle. If you tick those boxes though, there’s an amazing puzzling race waiting for you.

Better still for me, personally, is the main board working as a form of rondel.

I love rondels.

The action you choose to take has a cost associated with it, and that cost is the number of spaces your observatory pawn moves around the sectors of the board. The board is divided into the sectors you’re searching in, and a rotating cardboard piece – the Earth board – on the middle of the board hides half the sectors at any one time. You can only perform your searching actions on the visible sectors, and which sectors are visible is driven by the furthest back pawn. It gets so frustrating when you want to search a sector which has just been hidden. You might take expensive actions to race around to the other side, but if the other players don’t do the same and take cheaper actions, they could take multiple turns, learning more and more, while you’re waiting.

As the Earth board rotates it also points to some icons which allow the players to submit theories. If you think you know where some of the things in the sky are, you can add tokens to those sectors with your assertions hidden on the reverse side. With each of these theory phases the existing theories move inward one step, and once they reach the middle they’re flipped, checked on the app, and if they’re correct then not only will those players get some points, but everyone else knows exactly what’s in there.

Space is hard

If you’ve ever done any of those logic grid puzzles, you’ve got a good idea of what you’ll need to do in The Search for Planet X. It’s a process of elimination and using the scant information you’re given to lead to logical conclusions. It’s a really satisfying thing when it goes well, and the Eureka moments are fantastic. When you put two and two together and come up with four, well, that makes you feel like some kind of genius, and it’s great.

What happens when it doesn’t go well though? I’ve played games where I’m absolutely certain I know where planet X is. I make my guess, and part of that guess also includes what its neighbours are, and it tells me I’m wrong. When that happens, it’s very demoralising. It also makes things feel impossible. You can be certain of some things you’ve crossed out and circled, but you know some are wrong, and it leaves you desperately trying to unravel your mistakes, without necessarily knowing where they are. That’s a hard task at the best of times when you’re using the standard side of the board. When you’re playing the advanced game on the other side with 18 sectors instead of 12, and with even more things to identify, it’s a hard blow to take.

I’d also hate to be the person who sits down to play but isn’t used to any kind of logic problem. Maybe they’ve never done a logic grid, a sudoku puzzle, or a nonogram. The kind of thinking that helps you solve puzzles like these is normally learned, rather than innate, which makes The Search for Planet X a game where you need to be careful who your audience is. Bear that in mind when you’re deciding whether to buy the game or not.

Final thoughts

My last review was for a game unlike any other I’ve played: Oros (review here). I’m lucky to be covering two in a row that I can same thing about. I really enjoy logic puzzles, and I love rondels, so when Matthew and Ben (the designers) put both in the same box, I was already smitten. Biased? For sure, yeah, but then you’re here for my skewed opinion, right? The Search for Planet X ticks so many boxes for me, and I have so much fun playing it. I love playing a game that makes me feel clever, even if that does come tumbling down like a house of cards when I get it wrong.

This might just be me, but I have continuous paranoia when I’m playing. No matter how well I’m doing, I’m convinced that everyone else is one step ahead of me. It’s one of my favourite things about the game. It’s a full-on racing game at its heart, with the players racing to get to the right answers first. There’s a palpable moment of tension when the first person announces they’re going to make a guess for the location of planet X. If they get it wrong, there’s a good chance they’re close and things get very serious. If they get it right, those behind them in turn order get one last chance to make a guess at the location of different objects, and then it’s over. It’s important to note that you can win even if you don’t find the planet first. There are plenty of points on offer for identifying where everything else is, too.

The need for the app isn’t as bad as you might imagine, and one of the biggest added benefits from its inclusion is the fact that you can play solo. Sure, you only play against one opponent, but the game you play is exactly the same game as you’ll play against human opponents, so it’s the perfect way to practice or to get a learning game in ahead of teaching it at your local game night.

It’s not a game that everyone will enjoy, for sure, but with the right people, The Search for Planet X is amazing. It’ll give your brain a proper burn for an hour, and if you and your fellow astronomers are finding it easy, the advanced mode will bust you back down to feeling stupid in no time. Competitive logic and deduction at its finest.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

The Search For Planet X (2020)

Design: Matthew O’Malley, Ben Rosset
Publisher: Renegade Games Studio
Art: James Masino, Michael Pedro
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post The Search For Planet X Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve played other deduction games before, this might all sound familiar. Dishing out clues to help the rest of the table figure out the identities – ringing any bells? That’s right folks, Mysterium. Rear Window shares a lot of design DNA with Mysterium, but there are some small, but very important differences between the two.

“Well, that’s fine, Stella. Now would you fix me a sandwich please?”

The biggest difference between those two games is the goal of the game. In Mysterium, it’s always a cooperative game. All of the players win or lose together, so it’s always in everybody’s best interests to give good clues. In Rear Window, it’s usually the same. In order to win the Director needs the Watchers to correctly identify the four people involved, and their individual traits. To give them clues, they assign cards from their hand to the various windows on the board, hoping that the Watchers feed off the clues on each card you want them to notice, instead of the ones they invariably notice instead…

Earlier in this review though, you might have noticed the word ‘murder’, and if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that murder plays a big part. In the game adaptation the Watchers hand the Director 12 trait tiles and a murder tile. The tiles are shuffled and four of them are assigned – in secret, behind a screen – to each of the four apartments. You might think a 1-in-13 chance is low when it comes to drawing the murder tile, but the maths is more like 4-in-13, or closer to 1-in-3, so it happens quite often.

If and when a murder tile comes into play, the game is no longer cooperative. It’s now competitive. If the Watchers guess at least seven of the eight pieces of information, and guess where the murder happened, they win. For the Director to win when someone’s been offed, they have to make sure the Watchers guess at least six pieces of information and have them not guess where the murder happened. It’s a fine tightrope to tread.

It all goes to make Rear Window so tricky to play at first because as a Watcher, you have no idea whether a murder has happened. You’re working in good faith, you wonderful person you, because that’s all you have to go on at first. Figuring out whether there’s been a murder is tricky. Are the Director’s clues intentionally misleading so you don’t guess somebody’s done a bit of murdering, or are they just a bit crap at giving clues? Tricky…

“A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.”

The other big departure from Mysterium is the art direction for the cards. Mysterium is like Dixit, in that the cards are often surreal, with colours and images which don’t normally belong together. In Rear Window, the cards all feature people and/or places from each apartment. You’ll see very specific people on the cards, matching the people you’re trying to guess. On the one hand, this is great. If you want to tell them Miss Torso is in apartment A, you can just put a card with her in that slot on the board. The difficulty comes when – as Director – you have a hand of cards which don’t feature the people you want to point to. What then?

This is where things get equally frustrating for the Director and the Watchers. You’ll play a card to a slot because you have to, so you’ll hope they guess other features on the card instead. Maybe the Director doesn’t want you to focus on the person, they’re more interested in the food in the background, trying to steer you toward guessing that person has the Gourmand trait. The Director can play a couple of cards each round face-down, which is great when you’re the Director and don’t want to give false clues, but it can also draw suspicion from the Watchers. “Is she playing that card face-down because maybe they’re the murderer, and she doesn’t want us to know?”.

It doesn’t take much to get suspicions roused, I can tell you that much.

Final thoughts

Let’s do the quick and easy bit first. If you like Mysterium, you’ll love Rear Window. The core gameplay is very much the same, but the addition of a semi-cooperative goal, and the never knowing which goal is in play until the end of the game, is awesome. I’ve played with some people who didn’t get on with it as well, but some of that I’m sure came down to the fact that on their very final action of the game, they felt like it was a toss-up between murder and one of three remaining traits. Repeated play is definitely rewarded, as is having a group who might enjoy this sort of game. It’s all about abstract communication, not strategy.

I really like the art direction in the game. It stays true to the feeling and style of the film, and it’s functional at the same time as being really nice. I don’t often make much of a fuss about the art in a game, but in the case of Rear Window the whole game revolves around the artwork, so it matters. We’ve seen a few film tie-ins over the last few years, but the majority of them feel more like a couple of smaller games bolted together. Top Gun with its mixture of a beach volleyball game combined with a dog-fighting one. Jaws with the Island side of the board before the big battle with the angry fish on the rear. Interestingly, both of those games also came from the design studio of Prospero Hall, but Rear Window feels more polished and more refined. It could have been made without the Rear Window name and theming and been just as good.

I’ve not mentioned a few of the other things in the box. For instance, the tiles that the Watchers can use to sneak looks at or replace face-down cards, or get the Director to add a pointer to a card to show which thing to focus on (or not, if you’re feeling particularly devious). There are additional trait tiles which let you add a second person to an apartment along with some kind of relationship between the occupants, just to really spice things up. Rear Window is a very, very good game, and as much as I hate it when Youtube channels make their “this game killed this other game” videos, I can’t see Mysterium getting much more play for me now. Rear Window is like Mysterium 1.5 and it’s great.

Review copy kindly provided by Funko Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rear Window (2022)

Design: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Funko Games
Art: uncredited
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Rear Window Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If this style of pulp spy thriller action is your thing, NewSpeak was made for you. It’s a group game in the style of Codenames, Decrypto, and Spyfall. In a dystopian future, what we see and experience is controlled by The Moderators, à la The Matrix. A group of Dissidents (one team) is planning covert actions to hack the servers controlling the population’s view of the world, and need to communicate the target locations to their teammates. The Moderators (the other team) are listening in, however, so cunning clues and codewords are the order of the day.

The art of conversation

The Lead Dissident player is trying to feed the others their target location. They do this by having a good old-fashioned chin-wag, cross-referencing key words against a code card. The Dissident team are trying to get clues to the chosen location by listening to the Lead Dissident. They’re trying to pick up on certain words, then cross-reference those words on their card to figure out the true meaning.

It’s probably easiest to explain by way of an example – the one included in the rulebook. Let’s say my code card has these pairs of words on it, among others:

Big – Liquid
Fact – Glass
Happy – Loud
Life – Party

The conversation might sound like this:

“She seemed down today. Do you think she’s happy with her life?”

“The fact is, we can’t read too much into it without knowing the bigger picture”

If the team picked up on the correct words, they’d now have Loud, Party, Glass, and Party, which in turn should lead them to the Nightclub.

Cracking the code

The Moderators are trying to identify which set of codes the others are using. It’s very difficult in the first round, and as a Moderator you’ll find yourself trying to pick up on the words you think are the code words. It’s often after the first location is revealed that you can start to make connections, and try to piece things together.

I really like how the players start to get inventive once they get the hang of the game. The clues get more vague, and instead of using the words on the cards, synonyms start creeping in, in an attempt to obfuscate the real clues. Saying ‘food’ for example, might turn into “we’re going to have lunch”.

Those of you who have played Spyfall or Decrypto before will be able to see some strong similarities already between NewSpeak and those games, but this game adds another layer of nuance that I really enjoy. It’s a deeper, more-involved game than its counterparts. It’s actually one of the trickier deduction games to explain, and while it’s not actually difficult per sé, it’s a game that really benefits from an example round before you get into the game proper.

Final thoughts

NewSpeak is a great example of this style of game. As I mentioned above, fans of Decrypto, Spyfall and Codenames will probably really enjoy it. From personal experience, it can be quite difficult to get your players to engage in making up the nonsense sentences. I found some people can get quite self-conscious about it for some reason. Once the ice is broken though, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

I found the game to be at its best with four or five players, but your mileage may vary. When you play with your family, or close friends, it’s really tricky trying to hide your intentions from the Moderator. Some people just know you too well. I played this with a close group after a couple of drinks at a regular games night, and we had a hoot with it.

I wouldn’t recommend NewSpeak if you’re likely to be playing with three players, as the game shines best when you’ve got multiple Dissidents trying to guess at the same time, it makes the conversations and interactions much more interesting, and gives the Moderators more to think about. It’s a game best enjoyed with a group around a table – chatting, laughing, and trying to figure out just what the flipping heck is going on.

Review copy kindly provided by ITB Board Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

NewSpeak (2021)

Designers: Mark Stockton-Pitt, Fiona Jackson, Anthony Howgego
Publisher: ITB Board Games
Art: Zak Eidsvoog, David Thor Fjalarsson
Players: 3-6
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post NewSpeak Review appeared first on Punchboard.