Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective - The Baker Street Irregulars Board Game - Captivating Mystery Game for Kids & Adults, Ages 14+, 1-8 Players, 90 Min Playtime, Made by Space Cowboys

A fascinating dive into Sherlock's Victorian London with compelling mysteries to solve. You're given a map, address book and a newspaper page (plus ones from previous cases). Armed with these, you are presented with a crime to solve and have the freedom to choose how you go about it. When you are ready, you can go to the back page of the casebook to answer a range of questions. The mechanics of the gameplay are therefore very simple and effortless to learn, but the challenge is often high. You can play solo or in any sized group. There is a scoring system, based on your ability to answer the questions correctly while visiting as few locations as possible. However, I think the game is best enjoyed without worrying about it. Exploring London, going down rabbit holes, and being tricked by inevitable red herrings is more enjoyable for me than trying to "beat" Sherlock's score (which, let's face it, is rather a fool's errand). It seems a shame to have all this narrative material and then try to ignore as much of it as possible for a high score. But players are free to play however they like, so I don't really consider it a problem. There's ten cases in the box. A couple didn't quite grab me, but on the whole they're great and well-written. While replayability isn't really possible (maybe many years later?), there are dozens more free fan-written cases available online to get more mileage out of your purchase. Highly recommended.

After our playing the first scenario, I feel like this was a great choice for us. While we love games, this one isn’t bogged down with a bunch of rules, so it’s easy to get into — and great for non-gamers. The game play felt less like a game and more like we were actually investigators piecing together a mystery, thumbs up for its immersion value. While you do have the opportunity to compare yourself to Holmes at the end of each case, I’ll will always win if I have a good time, not how I compare to the great detective. We even purchased a copy for friends of ours since they live too far away to share the table with them.

A group of four women have been meeting at my house once a month for a year to play cooperative, mystery-solving games. After playing the second of the ten games in the box, we unanimously commented on how frustratingly challenging the Sherlock Holmes Irregulars games are—and also unanimously said how much we love these games and look forward to playing the next ones, when we optimistically believe we will be better. (After all, Sherlock himself is mentoring us.) The game is beautifully made, sturdy, well written. With ten games to play, it is an absolute bargain.

A group of friends and I get together every so often for mystery game night. We've been finishing through the Hunt A Killer series and we find this series quite enjoyable. We became used to the structure of having a pile of evidence to go through a few puzzles to figure out as one of the only type of mystery game. I decided to buy this game after seeing such high reviews online. The first case we did was structured so differently than what we were used to and was a lot more challenging. Not that we didn't use our brains before, but this style of mystery needed all of us to be locked in. After the great trial of the first case we started getting the hang of it and started to (hopefully) think like Sherlock. I compare the style to an RPG video game where you have to speak to specific people in a specific order to unlock different dialogue. You also have the walking simulator part where you have to go to a specific location the game allows you to go to find clues. It's a pretty interesting concept and works really well. I like how there's little mysteries you are solving along with the biggest mystery in each case. The story is pretty cohesive, too. The long narrative and dialogue is not usually my cup of tea, but my group made it fun. Once you immerse yourself, it really enhances your mystery solving experience! I just bought another set of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and my group and I are excited to solve those cases too.

I really love this game and find it unique. The basic mechanism is simple: you are given a case to solve with a brief introduction that already contains many important clues. Then you can gain additional clues by going anywhere on the map (using the directory to look up addresses) or reading the newspaper. If there’s an entry for that location, you read it and hopefully gain some more clues. When you’re ready to solve the case, you turn to the back and see how well you did. What I love about this is that despite the simplicity of the mechanics (which means anyone of any age can play, and I’ve heard about people even playing this in the car, with one person reading the entries), the cases have great depth and nuance. You’ll be discussing the case with your partner (I enjoy playing this two-player) and trying to piece together clues and evaluate theories. Eventually you’ll have enough clues to think of a coherent theory. I’ve played this with my mother, who doesn’t play board games but enjoys watching Colombo and such shows, and it works great. We’ve solved the first two cases with 70 and 85 pts—very respectable scores. Some people find it too hard, but if you are willing to keep investigating, you’ll eventually have plenty of clues. It’s also great that the game allows you to bring in your real world knowledge to help you solve the case: the battle of Trafalgar, the way people smoked cigarettes, etc. The detail is fantastic. The materials are also top notch. Everything looks and feels great. I’m very much looking forward to the future cases and future boxed sets. There’s nothing else I’ve come across that’s quite like this game!

My kids and I play a lot of escape room and cooperative games, and this is by far my favorite. It is very challenging and beating Sherlock Holmes is impossible. So we just try to solve the mysteries (answer all the questions correctly) instead of trying to beat Holmes. We've only played the first few cases, but we've enjoyed them all. Each one has taken 2 to 3 hours. Playing with 1 to 4 people seems to be the best. More than that and I feel like someone will be bored. I played one by myself and missed some clues but still enjoyed it. I think playing with someone else would have been better, but not necessary. The game itself is beautifully made. Even the storage box feels like a better quality than the usual game box. It's pricey, but with 10 cases in it I think it's a great price. If you are gentle with the pieces you can easily pass it on to someone else to play. I'm very excited that there are 3 more boxes to buy! We'll be getting them all for sure! If you are hesitating because this isn't a replayable game, don't! You'll get many hours of fun and I'm sure you won't feel cheated.

Love this game! We enjoy playing as a family as it is easy to cooperatively approach the gameplay. It plays out like a more text based escape room/mystery novel and does require a significant amount of reading. The individual mysteries generally take around 1.5-2 hours depending on the speed of your reading and desire to succeed with minimal hints and each module builds upon the one before it so make sure to do things in the right order. Depending on your memory there isn't a high likelihood of "replayablity," but it's a great game to share with friends after you've finished.

I bought the original Consulting Detective series of games when they came out in the 1980's. They were great fun to play, but the production quality of the game materials was generally poor; there were frequent spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors; and there were inconsistencies between what the clues said and what Holmes said at the end of each case. One overlooked such deficiencies because the game was so fun to play. When I saw that new editions had come out with higher production quality, I snapped them up in the hope that modern digital editing techniques and a thorough review of the case materials would fix the deficiencies in the original series. Sad to say, while the new game materials are FAR superior to their 1980's originals, very little has been done to fix the other problems. There are still numerous spelling, punctuation, grammatical, and typographical errors, which are all the more glaring given the high quality of the game materials. There is simply no excuse for misspellings and grammatical errors in the age of Microsoft Word, nor is there any excuse for not having gone over the original case files to fix inconsistencies between facts presented in individual clues and facts presented by Holmes at the end of each case. My real rating for this product is 3.5 stars. I just couldn't give it a fourth star given my disappointment over putting out an updated edition of an otherwise great game without fixing the problems in the original.

I love this game. It's perfect.

This game is the best. So different than any other board game, exciting and fun! All the cases are in-depth and very detailed (or at least the 3 we played so far), the newspapers are cleverly put together and the whole game experience is just awesome. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys crime & detective stories. Bear in mind though that it's NOT a party game, when you sit down to play, you're in for a 2-3 hour sitting, reading and speculating, so don't bother bringing it to a party that was supposed to be about music, alcohol and chit-chat. Also, don't worry that the cases are not replayable. 10 is a lot, you probably won't finish it in 10 days. The cases are - as I mentioned - in-depth and can be tiring too, so once you finish them you'll feel like you just finished a very-very long book. Besides, there are two more games with 10-10 brand new cases each so if your only concern is that the cases are not replayable then drop it and just buy the game! 😃 You won't regret it.

Baker Street Irregulars is probably my best board game yet. I love how this game is a combination of both storytelling and brain challenges.

I finished this game recently with a friend and I honestly can't praise it enough. Every case is really interesting and makes complete sense when you read the solution/s at the end. There are a number of cases that work slightly different from the rest which keeps the game fresh and exciting throughout. If you are playing for the first time, there are a few points I would like to add: 1-Don't try to beat Sherlock. I think it must be possible to beat Sherlock, but I'm not sure how you would without fluking it or cheating. If you've ever read any of the Sherlock Holmes books, watched the films or TV series, you will know that he is the master detective. It works so much better for it when he explains how he solved the case in less moves than you did at the end of each case. It wouldn't be as good if he turned out to be pretty dim. I would recommend trying your best to score above 0, its ok if not, the most satisfying part is understanding the case. 2- It can be quite difficult to know when to call it. The first time we played, we wanted to see all the criminals in handcuffs but it is usually just about understanding what has happened. There is a possibility that you may get side tracked to some extent, but often you will be presented with some additional questions to boost up your score at the end. Ultimately, the more leads you follow, the more content you get, so just enjoy figuring it all out. When we played, we did pretty well (I think). The lowest score we got was +35, which from what I understand is OK, however each case took us around 4 hours or more to finish which considering the box contains 10 cases, is amazing value for the money. Just know that this isn't a party game. If you want to do well and get the most out of the game, you are in for the long haul (scrutinising newspapers, directories, the map, the case book and using all the ink in your pen collection to make a mountain of notes). Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I will certainly buy another edition at some point, though I feel like I need a long holiday before I embark upon what was the best "board game" I have played, accompanied by essentially a ton of work.

Really good game. No problem with delivery.