A Carnivore Did It!
- Board's Eye View
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
A Carnivore Did It! is a logic deduction game from Horrible Guild. It's designed by Daumilas Ardickas and Urtis Sulinskas, with art by Cecilia Lonnie. It can be played as a cooperative game with pretty much any number of players discussing and arguing over the clues, and you can play competitively by racing other players to deduce whodunnit. A Carnivore Did It! is at its best, however, as a solitaire puzzler or with two players working together to logically reconcile the statements.
The carnivorous animal theme is really just the game's dressing. For each puzzle you'll be given the number of suspects (just three at the simplest levels, rising to a maximum of seven). For each puzzle, you're given a statement that is assigned to each suspect. At the simplest level there will be just one suspect who is the guilty party and only one of the statements will be a lie. Most folk will find it pretty easy to use the simple logic needed to deduce the guilty party in these puzzles.
Things get notably trickier tho' as you tackle puzzles on other cards. There's not only an increase in the number of suspects but there may also be more than one culprit and as many as three false statements... Oh, and you should be working against a timer...
It's impressive just how many puzzles Horrible Guild have packed into this box - 2000 in total, so literally hundreds at each level of difficulty. That means this is a game with plenty of replayability. Indeed, with that number of puzzles, most folk will be hard put to remember the solution even for puzzles they've done before.
The game uses a sliding window to mark out the statement cards used for each individual puzzle. That works fine. The idea is that when you think you've solved a puzzle, you flip the card and you can read the otherwise obscured answer in a red-tinted window. You'll need good eyesight and decent lighting to read the answers. If your experience is like ours, you may struggle and curse to make out the numbers in the tiny tinted window. On the plus side, however, you're highly unlikely to suffer from accidental spoilers!
