Prime Suspect - The Board Game Project
Prime Suspect is the kind of game that becomes more and more interesting as you develop it. I don't want to say I was excited about it, but that I love it when we finished it, as all our ideas came together and seemed as amazing as we want them to be.
The idea came out during a brainstorming, as initially we had 4 ideas, but none of them was good enough for every each of us. In the end, we decided to keep what we love most about every concept and mix it up into a new game inspired by the story of L.A. Noire.
The story is simple: a murder took place in a prestigious restaurant and you play as a detective in order to unmask the cold blooded killer when all you know is that the crime weapon was a knife and the victim was a famous critique who wrote a really nasty review about this place . The suspects are the staff of the restaurant: the chef, the sous chef, the waiter, the waitress, the hostess, the bartender, the security guard, the dishwasher, the janitor and the manager. Each character has two sets of cards: the general set and the guilty set. The general deck offers information about the time of their arrival, general features of their personality or how they could have access to the crime weapon. The guilty set of cards has really relevant data for the case, as there are statements of the characters that point to the killer. One of the players needs to play the dealer (somehow, an equivalent of the Czar in Cards Against Humanity). He secretly picks who the killer is and shuffles in the guilty deck of cards. What prevent the game from being boring is the fact that characters can have statements that might point to more than one character at once. In order to win, the player needs to have four cards that point to the same person. Among those 4 cards, there is a clue that makes obvious who the killer was and you need the other 3 in order to make this card valid.
We wanted to avoid the thing that annoys us most when playing a board game: the blank spaces. I have always felt that they mess up with the player's thrill because when you lend on a blank space, you do nothing that turn and that's uncomfortable for a fun board game. With that being said, after placing the characters on the board, we filled the remaining spaces with events (in which you can have an extra clue, switch a card with another player, steal a card from another player or post-pone your investigation by missing a turn).
Another cliche that we avoided was the aesthetics of the board. Instead of writing the name of the characters in the space they were placed, we made them profile polaroid pictures (which are actually our digital sketches) and wrote their names on them. In order not to mislead the player, we filled the spaces where characters were placed with specific icons.
Even though I was a little reluctant about creating a board game at the beginning, I can say that I enjoy the result now and working with my team was very fun and inspiring, as they managed to make me want to give the best of myself.
