Welcome to our monthly look at some of the best new tabletop games. This time around we’re solving mysteries in Victorian London, escaping from locked rooms with nothing more than brain power and playing a beautiful game from a fantasy world.



Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

Jack The Ripper & West End Adventures

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective tasks players with solving a series of mysteries in Victorian London. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

1-8 players, 90+ minutes, RRP £41.99

Designers: Gary Grady, Suzanne Goldberg and Jérôme Ropert

Few characters in the history of fiction can have been reimagined as often as Sherlock Holmes. Over the years he has battled nazis, confronted malevolent alien gods and even collaborated on a case with Batman.

But for my money, the most exciting take on the genre-defining investigator is Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a tabletop mystery game first published in 1981. Now released in an updated and expanded version, it casts players as Holmes’ agents, working together to scour the streets of London and crack a succession of baffling cases.

Each game revolves around a casebook, which contains information you’ll discover as you play. You’ll start by reading an introductory scene that describes a horrible crime or impenetrable mystery, and then you’ll be let loose to investigate however you see fit. Each casebook is divided into scenes featuring different encounters, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book on steroids. You’ll visit underworld contacts in East End pubs, probe the upper echelons of Kensington society and uncover family scandals that powerful people would rather stayed hidden.

As you examine crime scenes, track down witnesses and interview suspects you’ll build a web of information, uncovering hidden motives and spotting holes in alibis. You’ll have flashes of inspiration when the disparate elements of a case suddenly slot together in your mind, and groan with frustration when it turns out you’ve been derailed by a well-placed red herring.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The game goes to impressive lengths to build a living Victorian London, including a set of newspapers with information that may or may not be useful to your inquiries. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

Eventually, when you think you can solve the case, you’ll read a final scene where Holmes explains how he arrived at the solution. You’ll win if you manage to arrive at the facts while following fewer leads than Holmes himself. As you’d expect, it’s a real challenge, but it’s also Consulting Detective’s greatest weakness, because while the game goes to incredible lengths to create a rich, bustling Victorian metropolis, it punishes players for taking the time to explore it. To win, you’ll have to be ruthlessly efficient in your investigation, which means missing out on side-scenes, supporting characters and little touches that add immensely to the feel and flavour of the game. In fact, to get the most out of each case, I’d recommend treating it less as a game than as a kind of interactive whodunnit.

There are a couple of other niggles including some anachronistic dialogue and Jack-The-Ripper-themed cases that get substantially darker than anything in the Holmes canon, which may put some players off (a previous set of cases has less disturbing subject matter). If you have any appreciation for story in games, though, this is a must-play.



Exit: The Game – The Secret Lab

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Exit escape room game. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

1-6 players, 60-120 minutes, RRP £12.99

Designers: Inka and Markus Brand

Over the past couple of years, escape room games have become something of a craze. Like a cut-rate version of The Crystal Maze, they see players locked in a room and forced to solve a series of fiendish puzzles in order to get out. Many feature professionally designed sets, impressive props and even actors playing allies and antagonists for escapees to encounter on their adventures.

It can all feel like a full-scale theatrical production, but a new game aims to condense the experience into something that fits on your kitchen table. Exit: The Game traps players in one of three locations: an ancient Egyptian tomb; creepy abandoned cabin; or – as our group played – a sinister science lab. To escape, you’ll need to discover a set of hidden codes, each concealed behind a different puzzle.

Describing any of them would spoil the experience of solving them, but they revolve around decks of cards representing different locations and objects, and they rely heavily on logic, observation and lateral thinking. They are also brilliantly conceived: complex enough to be genuinely challenging, but never so difficult that they feel unfair. Collaboratively solving a tricky puzzle feels massively rewarding, and the game leads you from one challenge to the next at a pace that doesn’t get dull for a second.



Exit isn’t the only recent game to explore this theme. Unlock! Escape Adventures takes a similar approach, but works with a companion smartphone app. After playing both, though, our group unanimously agreed that while it might not be as technologically flashy, Exit had better-designed puzzles, more impressive ideas and a more satisfying progression through its succession of head-scratching mysteries. You may only be able to play each scenario once, but at £12.99, that’s pretty great value for an unforgettable evening of brain-burning fun.



Also try: TIME Stories



Tak: A Beautiful Game

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tak is a two-player strategy game inspired by Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle fantasy novels. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

2 players, 10-30 minutes, RRP £54.99

Designers: James Ernest and Patrick Rothfuss

It may not yet be as widely known as Game of Thrones, but author Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle is set to become the next fantasy novel series to make the jump to TV screens, with an adaptation in the works by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.



Rothfuss is a lifelong gamer, and in the series’ second book he introduced readers to Tak, his setting’s answer to iconic games like chess or go. In 2016, fans raised more than $1.3m (£1m) in a crowdfunding campaign to create a real-world version.



The result is a two-payer game where opponents use brown or white pieces to build a “road” – an uninterrupted path in their own colour across a square grid board. At first glance it’s reminiscent of noughts-and-crosses, Connect Four or British game show Blockbusters if you removed the need to actually answer questions. But while it’s a simple premise, there are a couple of other elements that add to Tak’s strategic challenge. Players can move pieces around the board, forming three-dimensional stacks and redistributing them in new configurations. It makes it difficult to think more than a few moves ahead, and you can also build walls, a defensive move that prevents roads being built through particular squares.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A full game of Tak in seven seconds.

Like chess or draughts, Tak takes a handful of simple rules and uses them to create genuine depth. It feels like just the kind of strategy game that could have been invented centuries ago and passed down over generations. That’s exactly as you would expect from its portrayal in the Kingkiller Chronicle, although it’s engaging enough in its own right to appeal to people who haven’t read the books. It’s awfully pricey, though, especially in the UK, where it sells for £10 more than in the US. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I blame Brexit.



Also try: Onitama, Pylos

