Jolly Thinkers PJOL01 Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Mixed Colours

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The majority of social deduction games are short, to prevent the action dragging if the traitors get busted early. Something I’ve said before is that for all the challenges offered by modern board games, it’s disappointingly rare that players get to perform a play that’s shimmeringly brilliant. The premise is simple: the players are all colleagues in a shared location, except one, who’s actually a filthy spy and doesn’t have a clue where everyone is. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong Solve a crime and catch the killer in your midst Each role in Deception provided a vastly different gameplay experience.

Stay in touch by subscribing, joining our BoardGameGeek Guild, or by following The Thoughtful Gamer on facebook or twitter. That’s not at all easy since the competition includes a whimsical game of dream interpretation expressed through the scoring metaphor of rabbits.Exploring some of the optional rules and variants in the rulebook might be necessary to make the game work best for you, but I’m glad the options are there. You can play Deception completely straight, name a player and simply choose two cards in front of them, but it is much more enjoyable to weave a personal narrative about how they used those cards to commit the crime. Otherwise, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is one of my go-to party games and never fails to disappoint a crowd. That’s necessary to make the game somewhat challenging, but it makes the guessing to game time ratio very small compared to its peers. Each player’s role and team are randomly assigned at the start of play and include the unique roles of Forensic Scientist, Witness, Investigator, Murderer, and Accomplice.

Either it’s the correctly accused murderer trying to direct the light of inquiry on to someone else or it’s a falsely accused investigator trying to reflect it onto the person they think is the murderer. The framing of Deception seems utterly baffling – like a workplace disciplinary hearing expressed purely through the medium of angry subtweets. Yeah, you can lose arms and legs, there are spinning floor blades and pit traps, lootable containers on the board. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is a board game for 4 to 12 players designed by Tobey Ho and published by Grey Fox games in 2015.

Deception: Murder In Hong Kong, from Tobey Ho and Grey Fox Games, is the newest challenger to the throne (in my house anyways–BGG says it was released in 2014). Deception plays like a streamlined version of Mysterium, which in turn plays like an overly bureaucratic version of Dixit.