Thames & Kosmos Masters of Crime: Shadows, Immersive Crime-Solving Card Game, Cooperative Card Games for Adults and Teens, Family Games from Game Night, For 1 to 6 Players, Age 16+

This game is brilliant. Very interesting and fun. Kept us entertained for hours.

This is a great buy for groups of friends that enjoy escape rooms or murder mysteries. It's a one-time game, but also very easy to use scraps of paper instead of writing on the box contents, so you can pass it on to another group. We had a lot of fun. Only critique is the web-based component is a little clunky - a shame they haven't done QR codes or shorter URLs. We definitely plan to buy the other games in this series for future gatherings.

Players are asked to cooperatively plan a heist of a museum, steal two paintings and make their getaway through the city of Amsterdam. They are given all required information, but have to supplement it with their own research to come up with a plan. The game is driven by cards that provide text and images to set the scene and ask questions or to make decisions. Based on those decisions some cards are kept, others are discarded. A scoring mechanism gives the players an idea of how smart a decision was in the context of the game's objective (remember: you are criminals.). The neatest part is the second part of the game, when the actual heist is executed. Again, based on decisions made, cards kept or found the heist AND the subsequent getaway goes a certain way... At the end add up all the points you got and get a score. The game can be reset fully, so others can have a go too.

If it were an option, I would have given this 3.5 stars. We play a lot of the Exit and Unlock games, and I find the Exit games especially to be really well designed and fun to play. I was excited to play this one, but it was a little bit of a disappointment. The setup for this game is that you're planning a heist of an art museum. You have to assemble a crew, plan the heist and getaway, and then execute. Fine -- great setup! Where I was let down was in the quality of the puzzles. And I'm sort of struggling to describe this because they aren't really "puzzles" in the sense of an Exit game (there is one of that type in the whole game), but there is a lot of collateral that you have to read -- fake newspapers, fake websites, etc. -- and most of the "puzzles" are really just testing your attention to detail, because there might be an important fact in one of the newspaper articles that come with the game. For me, that kind of stuff -- testing reading comprehension -- is less fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that if you're going through the motions of reading the collateral and the websites they direct you to, then the puzzles are really obvious. In fairness, the game designers thought of that. To fix this problem, the scoring mechanism is a little arbitrary in my mind. There are typically two or three answers to puzzle: a conservative right answer, a risky right answer, and a wrong answer. Sometimes there is no "wrong" answer. When you complete a puzzle correctly, you receive stars, and you are scored on the number of stars that you receive throughout. You can score a lot of stars: 50 or something like that. But, you can also get alarms. You get an alarms when you do something dangerous or risky. Alarms are bad, and if you get too many, you lose stars or maybe even lose the game. As little as a handful of alarms, like 3 or 4, will cause you to lose stars. So the incentive, very clearly, is don't do anything risky, because alarms are bad. The trick, though, is that sometimes, a risky decision will get you more stars than alarm bells will cause you to lose, so it's a net gain. The problem, in my mind, is that there is no way to know when to be risky and when not to be. It seems purely arbitrary. Without getting into spoilers, there were also a couple of puzzles that you just had to know certain external facts. Maybe there was a website that the game pointed you to, but none of the three of us who played the game noticed it, and we were questioning ourselves the whole time whether the game designers had just made a mistake, or whether it was part of a puzzle. Turns out, it was part of the puzzle, but it wasn't obvious, and it felt cheap to us. In sum, we thought that the puzzles were too easy, and there was too much just being walked through the game. The choices for the puzzles were mostly quite obvious, and if you pay attention to the materials that you're given, everything falls into place. We like the concept of the game -- there is a lot of potential here -- but the execution isn't the best. We bought a couple of the other Masters of Crime games when they were on sale and we haven't opened any of them up yet. We probably will at some point, but none of us are especially jazzed about it.

I love these games, they are very clever and elaborate. Buy all of them in the series, it gets easier after you’ve completed one and learn some of the tricks