Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 2+ hours
Components
Murder City comes in a small bookshelf box jam-packed with components.
Player Boards: Each player gets their own board which is printed on sturdy cardboard. They depict some nice photo-realistic artwork showing off a player's character and also include a listing of the character's background and powers. Finally, there are spaces for the majority of cards that you'll play, including credits, hardships that are affecting you, and matched sets of murder cards and evidence cards.
Cards: There are a huge variety of cards in this game, including hardship cards, murder cards, legwork cards, and five types of evidence cards. They're all printed on medium-light cardstock with no gloss or finish. The hardships and murder cards are full-size, while the legwork and evidence cards are half-size.
The credits (money) in the game are also printed as half-sized cards. Though I think the rest of the cards are a little below average in quality, by contrast the credits are much better quality than money tends to be in board games.
Dice: Five metallic-looking dice, which is unfortunately not enough for many rolls. Ten probably should have been included.
Rules: A plain black-and-white rulebook, which at 24 pages is pretty intimidating. There turned out to be lots of redundant information, which made reference during the game better. There's also a two-sided reference sheet which is a nice addition, and includes pretty much all the critical rules of the game.
Addressing all the components as a whole:
The game is set in a Bladerunner-like dystopian future. This theme is carried well throughout all the components and gives the game a nice, gritty feel.
The artwork on the cards is clearly intended to build up that theming. I found it quite bland because almost everything is monochromatic to try and keep that dystopic look, but other players liked it. The only place that I think the artwork really shines is on the player boards, which has great, full-color, photo-realistic pictures of each character. Also on the topic of artwork, it's fairly minimalistic. Other than the original artwork on the player boards, almost everything is repeated. For example, there's only one piece of artwork for each of the five evidence decks, and only one tiny, repeated piece of art on each of the murder cards.
A lot of the above complaints are aesthetic, but my biggest problem with the components was pragmatic: they're quite hard to use. There was no attempt to use icons, nor was there any attempt to make major elements of cards readable from across the table. Instead you have endless seas of text, despite the fact that with relatively little work that text could have been made simpler and easier to read.
Overall, the components in Murder City disappointed me, with slightly below average quality cards, poor beauty, small amounts of art, and bad utility. The theming is the only thing that really shines; despite that, Murder City only earns "2" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
In Murder City you're trying to earn credits by successfully bringing murder cases to trial and by arbitrating other players' cases.
Setup: Each player begins the game with 1 character, 3 murder cards, 3 evidence cards, 3 credits, and 1 legwork card.
Character. The characters are nicely themed and described and also each have a game-relevant advantage and disadvantage. The advantages allows a player to dig through the discard pile of one type of evidence and also lets him roll an extra die when bringing a case to trial with that evidence. The disadvantage forces a character to pay a credit to take a specific type of evidence.
Murder Cards. These detail the crimes that a player is trying to solve. Each lists the three types of evidence that a player may include for that murder. Each murder is also color-coded to coordinate with evidence cards.
Evidence Cards. There are five decks of evidence cards in all: eyewitness, forensics, interrogation, murder weapon, and professional opinion. Each evidence is also color-coded to coordinate with murder cards.
Legwork Cards. This is a pretty standard set of "take that" cards, most of which let you mess with other players. There are also some setbacks which affect everyone.
Order of Play: A round of play consists of three parts which all the players participate in:
- Beginning Phase
- Investigation Phase
- Court Phase
Beginning Phase: Each round starts out with each player drawing a new Legwork card which can be used at other times by the player to help himself or hurt opponents.
Investigative Phase: During this phase a player draws two cards from the evidence decks. As already noted, each player has a type of evidence where they can alternatively draw from the discard and a type of evidence that they must pay for. There’s also some opportunity for trading in this phase of the game.
Next a player may put as much evidence into play as he wants. All evidence cards are placed down to next to murder cards. Each murder lists three required types of evidence; cards played must match those types. Each murder also has a certain color; cards played should match that color--unless the investigator wants to be underhanded and purposefully play the wrong-colored evidence on his murder. He might get away with it, or he might get caught if he’s audited.
During this phase, an investigator may also draw one murder card if he’s previously lost one due to trial (or mistrial).
At the end of this phase a player generally wants to have five or less evidence cards, so that he can bring a case to court if he wants.
Court Phase: Now each player may bring one case to court. This is usually a murder with three evidence cards played to it, but a murder could have less cards if the investigator doesn’t mind bringing a weaker case.
An auditor is selected, usually the person to the player’s left. This auditor will be rewarded with 1 or more credits for participating. Now the active player engages in a bit of storytelling. Using the information on the murder and the evidence cards the player describes his case for the auditor. Theoretically hearing a verbal description will help the auditor assess whether the case is valid (but more on that when I talk about the game design).
Afterward the auditor decides whether to endorse, challenge, or rubberstamp the case. Challenge means that he gets to flip a random evidence card, and if it’s the wrong color, the case gets thrown out. However, he loses credibility if he misses incorrect evidence. Endorse means that he makes the case easier to win, but loses credibility if it doesn’t go anywhere. Rubberstamp means he doesn’t do anything, and the case continues normally.
Finally, the active player gets to see the results of the case, which he does by rolling dice. The total number is based on the strength of his evidence (with each card being worth 1-3 dice), whether some of the evidence is in his specialty (+1 die) and whether the auditor endorsed (+1 die). There are three target numbers that the player is trying to reach with the sum of his dice, one each for aggravated assault, manslaughter, and murder one. How well the active player does determines how many credits he earns for bringing the case to court.
Hardship Cards: The deck of hardship cards represent the grim and noir world of Murder City. Each turn a player may opt to take a bonus from a list (draw an extra evidence card, become an auditor, draw extra legwork cards, get an extra die at trial, rearrange evidence cards) in exchange for taking a hardship card. The hardship card then has various nasty effects, that as often as not seemed worse than the benefits you got.
Winning the Game: The game ends after six rounds of play. The player with the most credits is the winner.
Relationships to Other Games
Murder City is generally a unique game. At first you’d think it’s an investigative game, like Clue, but that’s not really the case at all. What happens is a lot more like resource management, since you’re trying to get the right types of evidence allocated to the appropriate cases.
Beyond that, Murder City’s most notable element is definitely its storytelling gameplay. This is a pretty rare gameplay element that shows up in games like Once Upon a Time and Mad Scientist University. You could probably totally punt this part of the game if you wanted, but if you don’t, telling the stories of your cases to your auditor becomes a very crucial part of the game.
The Game Design
Murder City is a classic American game design, which generally means that it’s heavy on theme and has a high degree of randomness to it, much like classics like Munchkin and Wizwar. Despite this, it does have some mechanics more common for a Eurogame, primarily the resource management system where you’re trying to get the right types of evidence to the right places. This all is pretty simple and works well enough.
However, where the game is really going to rise or fall is in its storytelling aspect, where you try and lay out the case for your auditor.
From the theming point of view, it works quite well. I think I’ve laughed more while playing Murder City than in any other game recently, thanks to the inventive and sometimes absurd stories that were told. For players who make their own fun, Murder City is terrific.
From the mechanical point of view, the ideas behind the evidence/auditor system are very innovative, but I’m not convinced they work very well. For everything to really click together, the evidence that you get with the game needs to (1) support whether a case is strong or not -and- (2) support whether incorrect evidence was used or not.
You can tell how strong a player’s evidence is some of the time. For example, a nominally aware AI is clearly not as good of a witness as a night watchman, and this will probably come across—making an auditor less likely to endorse—unless a player does a great job of explaining why that AI was the perfect witness. However the same isn’t true across all the types of evidence. For example, none of us could really figure out which types of interrogation were the best evidence: of “pleads ignorance”, “conflicting statements”, and “pleads insanity”, I have no idea which is stronger, nor really even what they mean. So, for this first element, the evidence cards did OK, but not great.
Unfortunately the evidence didn’t do anything to enlighten whether something was color-coded or not. For a Dead Employer is a broken window, a bloody fountain pen, or titanium knuckles most likely to be the murder weapon? The answer turns out to be a broken window, which just leads me to believe that no attempt was made to color-coordinate the murders and evidence in any type of meaningful way—which is a pity because it could have made the whole storytelling aspect that much more meaningful.
Overall, Murder City features simple mechanics and a story-telling system that will probably appeal to roleplayers even if it’s not as meaningful as it could have been with a better polished design. I’ve given it a high “3” out of “5” for Substance--slightly above average--with the additional comment that roleplayers and American gamers may like it even more.
Conclusion
Murder City is a game of resource management and storytelling where you try murder cases in a dark and gritty future. It features some fun mechanics, but overall they’re somewhat unpolished and heavily influenced by randomness, resulting in a game that will appeal most to roleplayers and other casual gamers who don’t need deeper, more strategic gameplay.
