A review copy was kindly provided by Zatu Distribution. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

A Carnivore Did It! is best described as a box full of logic problems. If you grew up with the Labyrinth movie with its ‘guards on the door’ puzzle, or more recently the video game Blue Price with its chest-opening puzzles, then you know what to expect. A process of elimination, done against the clock. If you don’t like that kind of thing, steer clear, but if you do like it, keep reading. You’re going to like this one.

VERDICT

players 1-5 | playing time 20 mins

Logic puzzle fans will get a real kick out of A Carnivore Did It!

logic

puzzle

knights & knaves

This kind of ‘two truths and a lie’ type problem is more traditionally known as Knights & Knaves, popularised by mathematician Raymond Smullyan. They’re also known as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs).

The premise is simple. You’re given some statements with some form of logical statements on them. You’re told how many of them are true or false, and you have to deduce the truth.

A Carnivore Did It builds on the CSP foundations and throws some window dressing on them. The suspects are a bunch of (really nicely illustrated) anthropomorphic animal characters, each with some different traits, such as their height and whether they’re a herbivore or carnivore.

Case by case

Included in the box are fifty statement cards, the cards for each of the suspects, a whole bunch of dossier cards, and a special magnifying glass sleeve thing. To set up a game, you choose a dossier card – the higher the number of the card, the more difficult the cases – and slip the magnifying glass sleeve over the card. You line the slot on the sleeve with the number of the case you want to solve, and it tells you everything you need to set up the game.

the suspect cards from a carnivore did it — The usual suspects. I’m disappointed there’s no Koala Soze.

The number of suspects, which statement cards to use, in which order, how many culprits there are (it starts off easy with just one, but gets harder later), and how many of the statements are either true or false.

You flip the statements face up, start the timer, and see how quickly your logical brain can discern the truth. When you think you’ve got the answer, you flip the dossier card over and read the number through the little red cellophane window and see if you were right or not.

the dossier sheet and magnifying glass in action — This case wants cards 4, 8, 37, and 7, in that order.

…and that’s the entire game, right there.

In fairness, there’s a campaign mode, and that’s the best way to play A Carnivore Did It. You play eight increasingly difficult games back to back, and see how well you do against the clock.

If it pleases the court, a demonstration

Let’s use a real-world example from the game. Yes, this is a spoiler, but it’s a single case from the two thousand included in the game, so I think you’re safe to read it through with me.

In this example, the dossier card tells me there’s one culprit, and that one of the statements is false. Let’s walk through the case.

Let’s choose the second statement, “Iguana didn’t do it”, and assume that’s the false one. That would mean that Iguana did do it. Except that Panther’s statement “Shark did it” would have to be true too, and because we’re only looking for one culprit, not two, this statement cannot be the false one.

Similarly, if we take the fourth statement “Peacock didn’t do it” to be false, that would mean that Peacock did do it. But Shark’s statement would now be true, and his says that the suspects next to him – including Peacock – didn’t do it. So that can’t be true either.

Now let’s look at the first statement, “Shark did it”. If it were false, then we’d know two things for certain. a) Shark didn’t do it, and b) that all the other statements are true. Shark’s statement says that the suspects next to him, Iguana and Peacock, didn’t do it, leaving only Panther.

It’s the only solution which doesn’t have a logical contradiction, so we flip over the Dossier, look in the little red window and see that Panther was indeed the culprit. Good work, Holmes!

Final thoughts

If you read through that example and thought “Wait, that’s a game??”, then A Carnivore Did It! isn’t for you. Some games you can bring people around to, but if someone doesn’t enjoy deduction, and would rather have a lap dance from Nigel Farage than do a Sudoku puzzle, they should steer clear of this game.

If, however, you enjoy this type of puzzle, A Carnivore Did It is a real treat. I love logic puzzles. I do Clues By Sam every day (and you should too), so this is right up my street. Strictly speaking, there’s barely a game there at all. The addition of a campaign mode means that there’s at least some semblance of gamification, but it’s thin.

That doesn’t really matter, though. A Carnivore Did It! is a box full of clever puzzles, which are honestly really difficult at higher levels. Puzzles which will see just how little plasticity is left in your ageing brain. Although there are only seven cards with any real artwork on them, the presentation throughout is gorgeous and really striking.

It looks like it’s going to be less than £20 most places when it’s widely available, which for logic fans is a bit of a bargain. Good stuff!

Where to buy A Carnivore Did It!

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