Does your family love mysteries, clues, and logic? 221B Baker Street might be just the game for you! It combines Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with Wells’ Time Machine to give you crimes to solve in 20th-century America.
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Downsides of 221B Baker Street
There are only 20 crimes to solve, so that is a definite downside, but there are expansion packs. I’m finding, that with these mystery-solving games, they keep trying to include a board and make you go to different locations. It seems to work out okay in Clue, but definitely with the CSI game, and to a lesser extent this game, the board just gets in the way.
I love a good whodunnit, and (fictional) crime shows are some of our favorites, but I find myself getting frustrated with the way a board is forced into some of these. The distances between locations in 221B Baker Street can be long and take a few dice rolls. Maybe I would enjoy the game more if we substituted in one of our D20s from DnD. Or maybe we roll 4 D6s, so we have a minimum roll of 4. Or just multiply our roll by 4? Hmm … I’m liking that option; we can practice our multiplication of 4s while we play the game!
Pre-read Cases if You’re Worried About Appropriateness
Some of the cases may not be considered appropriate for all children. There are no pictures in the game, but there are descriptions that you might not be comfortable with your kids reading or hearing. For example, the first case is The Adventure of the Dissected Dahlia. However, our kids (8 and 10 of this writing) are fine with this sort of thing.
Something else that we found annoying was that all the clues were in one book. I can understand them not wanting to create cards for clues like was done for the CSI game, but it meant we often had to wait while one player was finishing up reading a clue. Had there been cards, or at least 4 copies of the clues, we could have moved the game along much faster.
Overall, I love whodunnits too much to get rid of this game. I think we’ll simply use my ideas to make gameplay a little faster. Between multiplying our rolls by 4 and making additional copies of the rules, we should have a more enjoyable game.
Edit: After playing the game again today, I’ve decided I simply don’t have the patience for it. We’ll just go through the clues for each individual case and solve the crimes, then rehome the game. Even though my kids are pretty comfortable writing now, I just can’t stomach how long everything takes when playing 221B Baker Street as the rules instruct.
