Only Murders in the Building

If you've not seen the TV series Only Murders in the Building we recommend you stop reading right now and start watching. At time of writing there have been five seasons of the show, available on Hulu/Disney+, and it's been renewed for a sixth season. It's a comedy murder-mystery series starring Steve Martin (Charles), Martin Short (Oliver) and Selena Gomez (Mabel) as a mismatched trio of true crime podcasters investigating foul play in their New York apartment block. If you're a fan of the show then you'll get a kick out of this board game designed by Prospero Hall and published by Funko and Goliath Games.

That said, Only Murders in the Building: The Game is just as playable if you're not familiar with the IP and have never even heard of the TV series. If that's you, then you too can be an amateur detective; the only thing that you'll find puzzling will be some of the odd components. Why, for example, is the first player token a parrot?

Only Murders in the Building is a fully cooperative Cluedo-style deduction game where you're collecting clues and placing them out to make links on the board that will identify the apartment where the murder was committed. So it's not so much a Whodunnit as Wheredunnit. Players all share control of the meeples abstractly representing the three main characters from the TV series. The board around which they move represents 12 apartments in the Arconia building which they share. Each of the apartments tho' can only be visited by just one or two of the characters; none of the apartments are accessible to all three...

As Mabel points out in Season 1, 'I'm a stranger that lied to you a bunch, and you're two randos that dragged me into a podcast'. We'd have liked to have seen some reflection in the game of the idiosyncrasies of the Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez characters but the quality of Funko's production does much to capture the atmosphere of the TV series. For example, the solution card for each game is held in a device shaped like the front of the Arconia building as it appears in the show's title sequence. When you collect clue tiles you place them onto the board and try to create a path that connects to the suspect tile. When you create a connection to an object, you open the corresponding window in the Arconia building (where you inserted the solution card) and that will show whether or not that object is in the room where the murder was committed. In this way the players are able to eliminate rooms until they are able to agree on their deduction of where the murder took place. You'll still need to collect further clues tho' in order to build a path connecting to that apartment.

Tho' the players are all working together they don't have things all their own way: the murderer has an accomplice - a non-player character who is also moving around the board and who is picking up and hiding clues. The accomplice always moves towards the closest clue and their movement is determined by the roll of a custom six-sided die (0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4). That means the players are in a race because if the accomplice manages to collect six clues, it's game over and the players lose. You have to complete all the actions you want a character to make on a round before you can activate another character, and this is a limited communication game so players can't announce which cards they have in their hand... And it's not always easy to move a character where you need them to be; you have to have a movement card for that character and you must always move the exact distance indicated on the card, which can be frustrating because it can mean you have to go past the apartment that you're trying to reach. And to collect a clue token, a player will also need to play a search card when the character is at the right location.

There are always 12 movement and search cards in a round, so you each have fewer cards the more you increase the number of players (ie: six cards each in a two-player game; four cards in a three-player game and three cards in a four-player game). That makes the game notably harder with four players than when you play with just two. You can step up the difficulty to reflect this by altering the starting position of the suspect tile to which you have to connect; moving it to the edge in a two-player game means you'll need to collect more clue tiles, so makes the game a tad tougher.

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