Dead Man's Hand

 

Another catch-up from last year's Christmas stocking fillers in various UK shops that of course I've only got around to playing this year. Part of the delay here was because a bit of disillusionment with the Prof Puzzle games set in as so many were much of a muchness -- individual puzzle cards or bits of paper, of quite common low-effort puzzling to give a symbol-letter pairing, for the final decode.

This one could not have been more different -- it's primarily a logic puzzle solve (you know the sort of thing, six people, six professions, six items, six seats, six poker hands, work out where the ticks go, where the crosses go, and build a full picture). Instead of a wall of text and clues to solve to work this out, you have fingerprints, playing cards (to reconstruct the six poker hands), decoding, witness statement, cut out hidden words, a whole plethora of different things to do, and all packed into a really small box.

This punches way above its weight and the only downside I had was I was missing the final Safe card to put my answers into (I even had the dial card but no Safe to use it against). This didn't hurt the experience because the whole puzzle point is working out the logic chart (the story is not really the point of this one) and I had a really enjoyable time with this.