Murdle is an interesting blend of Mastermind and Cluedo, you and your fellow players compete to figure out which of the 4 suspects is the guilty party. The twist, you all learn certain starting information and then must carefully reveal information to learn more but try to not give too much away to the other detectives!
You take turns to do one of two things, tell every something that is not true or something that is. Each has their own rules but they all lead to taking one of the suspect files and looking at a new piece of information. While you do this, your opponents can try to deduce what this information means to them.
All your information is collected on the central grid for the game that all players can see, this grid shows the suspects, potential weapons, and locations. Using large crosses and ticks in columns and rows the game highlights for the crime what, where, and by who. As the game progresses all players will start to see more information and be able to make a final deduction but be careful, get it wrong and you are out for the rest of the game!
We found this game to be a fun quick game with experienced players and would probably take longer for more casual players. The instructions are simple and clear. The only problem we found was if one player gets lucky early on and learns who the guilty person is, they can quickly win before anyone else has a chance to make a deduction. We felt as a group it should be harder to learn who the guilty party is or have more suspects – this would extend the game but could make for a fun series of Sherlock Holmes moments for the players.
Overall we enjoyed the game but for experienced board gamers who play a lot of social deduction games this is a nice and quick game to play between bigger and more complex games. It left, for us at least, a little bit of a lackluster feeling at the end.
For a family or casual group, this game is a great introduction to social dedication and information gathering games and I would recommend trying this out.
The Review Studio 