I play maybe a half dozen one-shot/escape room/murder mystery-style games a year. I’ve written so many reviews of these deduction titles that it’s hard to even remember them all at this point!

I know a winner when I see one, and on the heels of some of the best games to hit the market in this category with the entries from the KOSMOS Masters of Crime series, I am continuing to explore the market. I’m sure other publishers are making great titles here…right?

During my visit to Germany for SPIEL Essen 2025, I picked up a copy of My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey from the team at Horrible Guild. There’s no getting around it—the title of this game is terrible. I might have even said that to our friends at the publisher…”My Murder Mystery” is the name of the series? “A Dead Monkey”??? What is going on here? Even if some of this was lost in translation (Horrible Guild is an Italian publishing house), I still can’t figure out why they landed on “My Murder Mystery.”

(My 11-year-old heard the game’s title and was horrified by its implication: “do you have to investigate the murder of a MONKEY???”

Don’t sweat it. The title is terrible…but the game here is magic, and it instantly becomes a serious…

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Just One is a game from 2018. It was nominated for many awards, and it won many too, the most prestigious one being the Spiel des Jahres (2019). This is a party game and a cooperative game. The idea is simple. Every round one person plays the active player and needs to guess a word. That word is known to everyone else, and everyone must give a one word clue to help the active player guess

Burst is a light card game that can be described as group Black Jack. That’s just like my game Pinocchio, but in Pinocchio the cards are hidden. In Burst you can see all the cards played.  On your turn you either draw a card or play a card to the centre of the table. You have a hand size of three, so if you have three cards, you must play one. Cards in hand are your points. They are