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Incredible! The shifty thief who operates undisturbed from months is about to be caught! After copious failures, a team of detectives has a secret weapon: a witness. However this witness is quite weird; he doesn't remember anything about the appearance of the criminal, but he knows everything about their habits and behavior. Will the investigative team be able to find out the criminal only from these elements?
In Insoliti Sospetti ("Unusual Suspects"), one player is the Witness and the other players play the part of the Investigative Team. The Witness knows the real identity of the Guilty and tries to make the Team hit it only with his answers. The Team asks questions to the Witness and, depending on his answers, will exclude the innocent suspects after players have discussed what they learned.
Insoliti Sospetti can also be played competitively or collaboratively (team vs team). In the latter case, a grid of twelve suspects is created. Every round the team reveals a question card and the Witness has to answer yes/no. According to the answer, the team has to remove suspects until only the Guilty one is on the board.
GTS 2016 - Unusual Suspects
- Fun party game
- Works well for larger groups (up to 16)
- High replayability
- Encourages table talk and storytelling
- Quick to play (around 15 minutes)
- Can be played with or without scoring
- Can be challenging to identify the thief when few suspects remain
- Witness must remain silent and not give verbal cues
- Crime
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- cooperative play — All players work together towards a common goal of identifying the thief.
- deduction — Players deduce the identity of the thief by asking questions that can only be answered with 'yes' or 'no'.
- Hidden role — One player is secretly the thief, and the other players are detectives trying to identify them.
- Question Answering — The witness can only answer questions about the suspect's personality with a 'yes' or 'no'.
- Set Collection (implied) — Detectives aim to eliminate all suspects except the thief.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Hi everyone, welcome to Watch It Played.
- My name is Rodney Smith and we're here at GTS Distributions Come and Play Day event in Atlanta 2016.
- I brought Unusual Suspects, which is a new game coming out from us by Paulo Mori, and it is a fun party game.
- So, there's been a crime, a terrible crime or not so terrible.
- The problem with the witness is they can only comment yes or no on things that are about the suspect's personality.
- It's like your weird superpower, right? It's like but I can't remember their face.
- It's fully cooperative, right?
- There's an incentive to send as many home as soon as possible, right?
- You get into these fun conversations where it's just like, well, no, like he's a cop, so he wouldn't have tattoos.
- There's tons of replayability. You're not seeing the same people in the same organization all the time, the same questions.
- It's a quick game, so it really does a good job between bigger games or if you're just kind of looking for a light game to play throughout the night.
- Well, Jared, thank you. I think it's a pretty good overview.
- And to the rest of you, of course, until the next episode, thanks for watching.
References (from this video)
- Cabo
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- this for me is not work it's fun and I intend to keep it that way
- I value meaningful decisions more than anything else, what is the consequence to my actions
- I would 100% choose to teach a game over being taught to the game
- quantity over quality is a key point I think harms the hobby