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I like it when designer-publishers work on their games to make them attractive and useful to others. Not everyone does this – sometimes from lack of skill, but often from laziness or unrealistic deadlines. Semi-comprehensible rule texts, especially, are a far too common problem in the indie game movement.

Dirty Secrets looks good. The cover is glossy, classy and cool. The layout is meant to mimic police reports and similar type-written documents – it's not to my taste, but it's well done. I didn't notice any typos – and most importantly: The game is written in a structured fashion. The rules appear when they're needed; everything is explained and ordered very clearly. There were one or two places where I thought details were ambiguous, but that's very hard to avoid.

What do the players do?

In Dirty Secrets, one of the players acts as the Investigator, playing a character who somehow is drawn into a situation where they start investigating a crime. Whether it's through their work or not isn't important – what's important is that they're pulled into the story via a contact. Perhaps they know the victim; perhaps they know the suspect; perhaps they know someone else who's involved. During the game, the Investigator will start each chapter (turn) of the game by requesting a scene, which can either be investigation (moving the plot forward), revelation (creating or «discovering» unexpected connections between characters) or reflection (which basically refreshes all players' resources).

The other players take turns being the Authority, who is responsible for reacting to the Investigator's scene requests (by accepting or countering them – sometimes with scenes of violence). In addition, the Authority plays out the opposition if there's conflict in a scene – basically, if the investigator gets into a fight, tries to interrogate an unwilling suspect or other challenging situations, the Authority rolls dice and makes decisions to make things hard for the Investigator.

The other players who aren't currently playing the Authority get to be Advisors. They don't have any real mechanical influence over the story. BUT. And this is a big BUT. (Which I like).

Jurisdiction

Mechanical influence over the story isn't a huge deal here. Strangely and wonderfully, this very structured game leaves the actual narrating of the story up to... everyone. At any point, anyone can say things like «Suddenly the building starts burning!» or even «The investigator decides to get drunk. Then drives home, is violently sick in the bathroom, and faints». The game doesn't say «only one player can control the character» - it says «anyone can control the character, but one person has veto rights».

This is done very elegantly with a system of jurisdictions and appeals. Basically, everyone has Jurisdiction over different characters and things in different scenes, meaning they can veto someone else's narration over those characters and things. However, a veto doesn't automatically stand. If you say something you think is cool, and I veto it, you can appeal to try to cancel my veto. If nobody else agrees with me (which is called upholding my veto), well, tough luck for me: You get your narration, even though I have jurisdiction.

The effect of this in play is that, since we're humans operating in a social environment, most narration is accepted. People use their jurisdiction vetoes only when they really disagree with something; I think that we used vetoes two or three times in one evening when we played. Most of the time, we just picked up what others made up and rolled with it.

Resolving conflicts

My least favorite part of the game, and one which takes a lot of space in the book, is the resolution of conflicts. The system uses a variation on Liar's Dice, a bluffing game which involves each player rolling their dice in secret, then guessing how many of the dice on the table have a certain face («Hm, I have two threes under my cup... I'll bet there must be five threes on the table!»). Players make bids, trying to force their opponent to make too high or low a bid – which will lose them dice, and thus influence on conflicts; the fewer dice you have to roll, the less you know about what all the dice in combination show.

The cool thing is that every time you roll dice, you have to narrate something about how the conflict evolves and escalates. The uncool thing is that... well... I don't like this way of doing stuff in the first place. We have a cool scene going on; we're talking, playing cool characters, everyone's listening to how the story twists; then all of a sudden someone says «that's a conflict, right?», and play s l o w s d o w n . Some players get frustrated they don't get the rules right away; others get them, but don't have anything to do during the conflict, so they wander off; others sit around to try to explain what's happening and make sure people don't forget to actually narrate stuff.

I'm pretty sure this sort of system (which exists in many games these days) is supposed to allow players to focus on the dramatic details. I've only seen one game where it works (Dogs in the Vineyard). In my opinion – and I know this is completely a matter of taste and play style – this part of the game should be tossed right out and replaced with something as elegant as the rest of Dirty Secrets.

Resolving crimes

After a sequence of investigation or violence, the chapter ends, and the players find out the repercussions - consequences of what happened in the scene. (Revelation and reflection sequences don't end the chapter). This happens by means of the crime grid, which is a grid with dimensions determined by the length of the story; a long story gets a big grid, a short story a tiny one. During the game, players write names of suspects on the squares of the grid, and after each chapter, a pawn called the Witness is moved around on the grid. If the Witness gets stuck – i.e., has to move onto a square with a name on it – one of the crimes is resolved.

Resolution means that the Witness is moved to a randomly determined space – and if there's a suspect's name there, that suspect did something. The player who moved the Witness gets to determine exactly what crime that suspect did commit.

The crime grid is is the most abstract and game-like part of Dirty Secrets, and it struck me as a bit strange when I first played it; however, next time I play it'll be no problem – it's easy to grok.

A well-balanced game

The game's major strength is its excellent combination of three factors: Structure, randomness and freedom. Too much structure in a story game, and it gets predictable or dry; too much randomness will make it incoherent; too much freedom makes the rules redundant.

Here are a few examples of what I mean.

When making characters, every player picks an empty character sheet and fills out one element, then passes their sheet on to the next player. After everyone's done this a few times, the result is a set of characters that are both very random and completely player-determined – perhaps I filled out a character's social status, you filled out their gender, and someone else filled out their race. We all have complete freedom of choice within the strict limits given.

When determining who's the perpetrator of a crime, the players can affect how long it takes before a crime is resolved – by moving the Witness in different directions. They can also affect who perpetrates a crime – by writing that name in many spaces on the crime grid. However, there's a limit on crimes, and when the crimes are resolved – a strong structure. Then again, players roll dice to see who perpetrated a crime – randomness. Finally, one player decides which of the available crimes – freedom.

When narrating, players have complete freedom. However, the jurisdiction rules are simple, strong and unbendable, and can be invoked at any time – strong structure.

All in all

In all, this is a game I liked playing a lot. Its daring use of randomness, coupled with well-tested structures and a basic trust in that players will do cool things when given enough freedom, makes the game shine in many places. It's a matter of taste that I really don't like the conflict system in the game.

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