Almost Innocent is a co-operative deduction game with a progressive story in which your teammates must work together across different scenarios to prove your innocence. Each one of you has been accused of various crimes that you didn't commit, and you'll have to uncover the truth throught a campaign divided into 3 acts. While being linked narratively, each scenario can be played individually, and there's no obligation to play them in the campaign's order.
Each scenario come as a 6x6 grid, in which you can find different types of colored boxes. Each box's color corresponds to a type of proof, and at the beginning of the game, each player will draw a card for each type of proof on the grid. This combination of cards is your neighbour's solution, so each player will be responsible for the solution of another player. Turn after turn, each player asks select questions that will help not only them, but everyone else playing as well. The goal is to find out your solution before you run out of questions, as you only have a limited number of questions to ask before the scenario ends!
At the end of the scenario, the players announce what they think their solution is. If everyone is right, you've won. If not, it looks like your group has lost...
Almost Innocent is higly modular: each scenario has 3 difficulty levels, to accomodate every type of players, from newcomers to experienced veterans of deduction games.
As you progress throught the scenarios, you'll unlock different modules. After all, each one of you is a character in their own right, it's only fair that you may have you very own powers...
—description from the publisher
- Cooperative experience
- Replayability across depths and stories
- Relies on effective communication among players
- Cooperation and information sharing
- Cooperative mystery with clues and personal character sheets
- Question-driven deduction with collaborative play
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Communication-based deduction — Questions and answers steer the logical path for the team.
- cooperative clue-giving — Players give and receive clues to deduce on their own sheets.
- deduction — Questions and answers steer the logical path for the team.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Little Alchemist a fun app driven family logic deduction type game.
- So great with all the kids, you know, everybody could play.
- Chronicles of Crime is that kind of quintessential app assisted.
- In the app, you will select which mystery you want to solve, which case you want to go on.
- You explore locations, and as you move your device around, it moves around the crime scene and you're looking and you're just shouting out the things that you see as you go.
- Animals of Baker Street is 100% app free. This is a good one to unplug, have the family play with the kids.
- I love Unlock as opposed to some of the other escape room type mystery games because you don't have to destroy anything.
- fully replayable.
- you can just hand this off to somebody else to enjoy and you don't have to reset it really that much.
References (from this video)
- brain burner/dense deduction
- high replayability via clues and exchanges
- heavier than casual deduction games
- can be slower with larger groups
- information as currency; left-right clue exchange
- Innocence and courtroom-style deduction in a semi-cooperative frame
- Clue
- Mind MGMT
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- information currency — cards representing clues are exchanged to gain more information
- left-right clue exchange — clues flow between neighbors as players try to deduce their own puzzle
- semi-cooperative deduction — players give and receive clues to determine identities and locations
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the currency in this game is information
- it's the closest game you're going to get to clue that isn't clue
- we freaking love this game
- this is essentially just a better version in my opinion of clue
References (from this video)
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's a beautiful kind of story
- you need to play with the right group
- it's not cute
- it's like comfort food games
- the rules are simple
- oh my god it's so good
- it's a ramp... chaos
- this is an easy one to just flick some discs around