When my friend brought over Sleuth for the first time the concept intrigued me. I love a good logical deduction game as much as the next person, and Sleuth just seemed like step up from that. Boy was I wrong.

Sleuth touts itself as a clever deduction game. Ask the right questions and you should get the right answers to solve the mystery behind the missing gems. This game is like Clue on steroids. People say if you like Clue you’ll like Sleuth–this just wasn’t the case for me.

Slueth, published in 1971, came as another game from master designer Sid Sackson. He also designed such games as Acquire, I’m The Boss!, and, one of my all time favorite games, Can’t Stop. So it is not at all surprising that a lot of people do love this game. In fact, it’s gained quite a bit of a cult following over the years. In Sleuth, players use Search Cards to discover and record what their opponents hold in their hands. Play continues this way until one player believes they have solved the mystery. They note their guess and check the missing gem. If correct, the player reveals the card and wins the game. Simple enough, but way more complicated than it sounds.

A lot of people at the table have to be invested in Sleuth to make it work. It’s easy to fall out of its “Magic Circle” quickly when you consider how frustrated people can get by just making one mistake. One mistake in this game can ruin the line of deduction and make it impossible to win. This gets frustrating quickly.

This game can play 3-7 players which is nice. The downside to this, however, is that the more people you have the longer this game takes. The long play time is another reason I wasn’t a huge fan of the game. Those of you who read the blog can deduce I’m more of an hour or less play kind of girl. I do invest time in bigger games If I’ve already set my mind down to committing that kind of time to a game. When I first played Sleuth though, i did realize it would be a minimum of 2 hours. With our game group I think we were there for 3 hours at least. I docked it a point on BGG for this.

Now that we’ve talked about Sleuth a little bit I’m going to tell you a story. With this podcast, I now spend even more time on BGG than I have in the past doing research on board games for the show. I come across new games all the time, and I happened to stumble upon a game called Deduce Or Die. I sent this BGG page to my friend immediately as I know he loves Sleuth, and people say that Deduce or Die is an even better version of Sleuth. The game itself states on BGG, “If you’re a fan of deduction games such as Code 777, Clue, Sleuth or Black Vienna, here’s an original design you may want to check out. I actually find it more challenging than any of the games I’ve listed, a statement that will be greeted with delight by some and with horror by others.” I myself was a bit horrified by this statement. There are some huge differences between Sleuth and Deduce or die, and I found myself liking Deduce Or Die better than Sleuth.

Unlike Sleuth, you can make this game at home with 3 decks of cards and some printed out play sheets. This makes it affordable and easy to play by anyone. I do like games you can make at home without having to spend a lot of money (see last article).

I didn’t expect I’d be playing it anytime soon, but the next game night we had, my friend brought over the printed sheets for Deduce or Die, three decks of cards, and eagerly asked if we’d want to play. I was a little apprehensive to play as I’d already proven my absolute awfulness at Sleuth. But his enthusiasm to play convinced everyone there to sit down and give it a try. I found this game tedious and overwhelming. It was convoluted just as the description above stated. I found myself liking it . . . a lot.

There are several main reasons I liked Deduce or Die over Sleuth.

#1 Deduce or Die gives you a bigger sheet of paper to work with. I’m not sure if you bought the actual game itself what kind of sheet you’d get (again, we don’t own the actual game), but in the printed version I was able to get an entire sheet of paper. This was a lot of space to write detailed notes. In sleuth you’re only allowed like a half sheet of regular paper which just wasn’t enough.

#2 I was able to categorize the symbols better as I was familiar with Spades, Clubs and Hearts. I didn’t have to learn all new symbols from the get go like Sleuth. For some reason, trying to learn the new Symbols in Sleuth, along with trying to deduce what cards people had, was a lot for my brain to wrap around. Deduce or Die simplifies the symbols and I just appreciated that.

#3 Finally, although Deduce or Die did take about 1.5 hours that was about half the time Sleuth took, and I appreciated that.

#4 The line of questioning helped narrow things down more easily. I’m not going to get into the specifics of this, but play both games and you’ll understand.

The good thing about both of these games it hat they are easily available to play. Sleuth was out of print for nearly two decades, but you can now buy new copies on Amazon. They are both intricate, detail oriented deduction games. I like Deduce or Die better, but some might find Sleuth more their speed.

Check out both games and let me know what you of which game wins the logical deduction battle. If you’ve played both, which do you like better? Thanks for reading today’s article. We’ll see you next time.