Suspicion

One of the great things about being from southern Wisconsin (other than access to quality dairy and cheap liquor) is that the six degrees of separation don't leave much of a gap between a southern Wisconsin resident and Gary Gygax. My in-laws were involved with the early days of TSR. My father in law even claims to have developed a new printing technique to allow the production of the map included with the original Dungeons and Dragons box. This connection has also led to a number of games finding rest in the closets of my in-laws, games that never found their niche like D&D did.

This Christmas, these facts led to my having the fortune and displeasure of playing an old TSR game called "Suspicion." That's Gary Gygax on the cover in center frame being accused of the murder. My father in law took that picture.



The game is a murder mystery where one of the players is the murderer and everyone else is trying to figure out who the murderer is. It adds a note of complexity by giving points to innocent players for being wrongly accused of being the murderer.



Its not hard to see why the game never caught on. It has a 13 step set up process that took over an hour and requires all the players to be present. This process also involves lots of sorting and stuffing cards into envelopes. So it combines all the excitement of sending Christmas cards with all the excitement of setting up a board game. In comparison, the game itself is very short. It probably only lasted an hour at most. The rules have many suggestions about strategy to determine who the murderer is but the added complexity of false clues doesn't add any length to the game. Adding extra players doesn't seem to add length either because with the full six players the game could end in one round and really shouldn't take more than four. The players actions are relatively quick and each roll of the dice just pushes the game toward its inevitable conclusion. The game even boils the clues down to numbered cards so that very simple logic can determine the murderer. Repeat plays reduce set up time but there is still the issue of having to sort all 160 clue cards and stuff them into envelopes. Its basically a more labor intensive version of Clue.



Still I am glad to have played it because of the tenuous connection it represents between me and a great man I never got the chance to meet.