[Elementary was January’s patreon release. It will be available on our itch store soon.]
Hey everyone
I’m delighted to share with you January’s patreon game, Elementary.
Elementary is an Agatha Christie-esque game of convoluted relationships, seemingly insoluble mysteries and quirky detectives who solve them. It has a fair bit of Lovecraftesque DNA in it, and like that game, it is GMless: you take turns to introduce clues one at a time, building up a picture of the murder and who might have done it. A big difference, though, from Lovecraftesque is that it’s competitive. You each have a preferred suspect and you try to introduce clues that will implicate them. At the end, like the movie Clue, you each create an alternate ending where the detective accuses your target suspect.
It’s a really smashing game, and I hope you enjoy playing it.
Elementary is card-based. A PDF file for the cards is included. Knowing how difficult it is at the moment to play in person, I have also created a dedicated room in playingcards.io that you can use for online play.
Instructions for setting the game up on playingcards.io:
- Simply go to playingcards.io, open up a room, click the briefcase on the left and under “room options” (at the bottom of the screen) select “import from file” and use the .pcio file I’ve supplied.
- You’ll find this creates a room with the cards already in order and ready to use, together with instructions for how to proceed.
- Note: playingcards.io automatically deletes rooms after 30 days without use. I don’t recommend leaving that big a gap in an Elementary game but if you’re playing over multiple sessions, it’s worth saving your room using the “export to file” function, just in case.
As noted in our last update, we are pausing the Patreon after this release. We will keep you posted on plans to re-open, which I hope won’t be long off.
Cheers
Josh