A Carnivore Did It! - PBF recruitment and discussion

See Last game you bought? - #6137 by Phil for more info.

Sure :).

The game can be played as a co-op discussion, but it’d be prone to quarter-backing by whoever is best at processing the puzzle, and I don’t think it’ll work well via forum, so my initial thought is that each player solves it on their own and provides their solution as hidden text (with or without including their reasoning).

I guess I’d just provide the set-up for each case, and once everyone has submitted an answer I can score them and move to the next case.

I already have a house rule related to the time taken to find the solution. Officially you get 3, 2, or 1 stars depending on how quickly you solve the case; but solving it correctly-but-too-slowly gets you the same outcome (zero stars) as getting the wrong answer, which I immediately rejected. I say that correctly figuring out the solution is categorically better than getting the answer wrong.

If we included timing, then it would be up to each player to time themselves. I think I’d provide the three thresholds, and folks can give either their time or the time bracket they fall into. I think I’d make that an optional inclusion as well, so folks can provide some timing info if they wish to, or leave it out if they don’t.


The English rulebook is available on BGG. Here’s the important bit:

Note that each suspect is either a herbivore or a carnivore, as denoted by the circular icon at the top-left of their card. Other characteristics of each suspect are their name, their height, and their numeric position in the circular(!) “line-up”. Whenever relative positions are important, two suspects are only “next to” one another if they have consecutive numbers or if they have the highest and lowest numbers.

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I’d like to join, if I may :slightly_smiling_face:

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Come one, come all :). If I run it the way I’m thinking above, then there’s no player limit.

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No player limit? Then yes!

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I’ve added a page from the rulebook to the initial post.

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I don’t know this game, and I am on my phone, so I can’t easily read the rules you posted. But there are all sorts of scenarios where being too slow is the same as being wrong, from defusing a time bomb to simple buzzer style trivia games, so I disagree with the categorical rejection. There certainly are other places where the time is an entirely unimportant artificial limit, but as I said I don’t know this game

Definitely interested. Hopefully all the time I’ve spent on Blue Prince’s Parlo(u)r puzzles will be good preparation!

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I’m certainly in!

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I’ll play this into the ground!

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Sounds fun! I’m in, too!

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I’ll probably start posting puzzles from tomorrow evening. I’ll maintain some kind of running score for the initial group of participants, and move to the next puzzle once those players have either submitted a solution or decided to pass (or have run out of time, if holding themselves to a time limit), but any latecomers and lurkers are welcome to play along at home as well.

The puzzles start out easy, so the early rounds won’t take much of your time, but they’ll get trickier.

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The game is afoot!

For game 1 I’ve skipped the first couple of dossiers (which feature only three suspects), and we’ll probably reach a little over half way through the dossiers (difficulty levels). Depending on player interest, I was thinking I’d run two more games (always 8 cases each), and increasing the difficulty each time. I think game 1 will be almost entirely single-culprit cases; game 2 will be split between one and two culprits; and game three will start with two and include at least a couple of three-culprit cases from the final pair of dossiers. I might mix it up a little, but broadly that’s what I have in mind.

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FYI, a correct answer is a correct answer – I shan’t be deducting points for any logical mis-steps along the way (not least because I don’t wish to commit to analysing all the solutions to the more complicated cases :).

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If anyone wants ideas for notation...

I found the following simple system works well as the cases become more complex, such that working through chains of possibilities and consequences becomes necessary.

Just draw columns in a lined notebook and treat each column as a possible scenario. Put the suspect numbers vertically in the left-most column, and then choose a theory (e.g. Peacock is lying) to consider in the current column, and follow the logical threads of that. If those threads lead you to some new information (e.g. Peacock cannot be lying), then that gives you a new and improved starting point for the next column. Mark any starting points you know for certain (you might circle or shade them to indicate certain knowledge as opposed to mere possibility), and then rinse and repeat with a new theory in the next column.

E.g.: noting Truth / Lie, and Not / Guilty:

Suspect Theory 1 Theory 2
1 T N L N
2 L L
3 T L
4 L G
5 T N G

This way you can chase a lot of theories using a small amount of space (and obviously you don’t actually need column headings), so I found this quite effective.

(n.b. It might take multiple columns to reach a conclusion about a given theory, if there are multiple sub-branches of the initial theory to follow.)

(Another suggestion would be to review Roger’s solutions for puzzles you’ve already completed, as he’s taken a very comprehensive approach.)

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I was going to use proper Boolean symbols but typing them takes effort. :slight_smile:

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