Board Game Review: Bureau of Investigation

I wasn’t sure of the title of this game since it’s part of the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Series, but it's set in “The Cthulu Mythos,” where you play as a Bureau of Investigation Detective in Arkham and other places. Whatever the name is, you can find it on Amazon here: Bureau of Investigation Board Game

Let me back up…

I really enjoyed playing the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective games. In these, you play as a team of street kids who help Sherlock solve mysteries. Each set includes a number of cases the players solve cooperatively.

The gameplay for the Sherlock games includes “visiting” locations and reading their entry in a case booklet to gather information. Typically you only need to visit a few places to solve the case, and the more places you visit, the lower your final score will be.

I found many of the cases infuriating because the solutions contained logical leaps. Even when we visited all the required locations and a few more, we still didn’t come to a conclusion as definitively as Sherlock would. We would occasionally reread everything to see what we missed and still couldn’t see how the case was supposed to be solved.

But gripes aside, the game mechanics are really clever, and I think more board game publishers should make games like this. Heck, I could probably write one. (Maybe I should… but back to the topic!)

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of horror, I love Lovecraftian-style stories and have played several Lovecraft video games and board games. You know everything’s going to go to shit in the end, and it’s fun to sit back and watch the insanity slowly unfold. Also, cool monsters.

I’ve played through four of the five cases in the Bureau of Investigation set. The first two cases followed fairly closely to the mechanics used in the Sherlock games. I enjoyed the ambiguous nature of the cases, and fully expected not to come up with a solid answer at the end since I never really did in the Sherlock sets either.

The third and fourth cases, however, rejected all the established mechanics and did their own thing.

The third case included a time loop mechanic, which was pretty fun, except that we didn’t realize initially that the case had three booklets instead of the standard one, and we couldn’t figure out what to do for the longest time. This case ended up taking quite a lot of time to solve, and you had to keep erasing and rewriting figures on a map to keep track of details. It was a cool idea, but it would have worked better as an app or computer game where you have a device to keep track of the details for you.

The fourth case very much reminded me of those Unsolved Case Files, in that you are given a bunch of documents and evidence for a cold case and are asked to solve it. That’s fine, except that I don’t particularly like solving those cases since you’re looking through a large stack of information for the ONE contradiction that solves the entire case. This case should not have been included.

I wanted so much more from this set. I had hoped the developers had learned from the thoughtful critiques of the Sherlock games from the board game enthusiast community and would have put out cases that were fun and solvable. I really want to support this inventive way of making board games, where players experience a story together. I hope more board game developers hop on this niche and produce some quality cases that are solvable and give players the satisfaction of puzzling together something truly unique.