Di Renjie Review

My husband and I have recently gotten very into funding Kickstarter projects.  In particular, we have enjoyed funding board/card games.  Like most people in the US, we grew up playing the basics like Monopoly (this game still makes me cringe whenever I think of it), Sorry!, and Clue.  We had no idea there was an entire board gaming culture out there filled with wonderful possibilities for fun and thinking.  Our first realization came when my husband stumbled across Pandemic.  We ordered it out of curiosity and have been hooked on awesome board and card games ever since.  Fortunately, there are a lot of them out there.

One way that we have chosen to engage in this community is by supporting start up games on Kickstarter.  It's always awesome to see a game that we helped fund the production of show up in brick and mortar stores (e.g. Flashpoint).  But not all of them do (e.g. Di Renjie).  So I've decided to share my feelings about Di Renjie on my blog.

First, some background.  When I turned 10 or 12, I realized that you could use logic and strategy to almost always win at Clue as long as you didn't share this strategy with everyone.  So even though I got this game for Christmas one year, my family quickly stopped being willing to play this game with me.  Plus it needs at least 3 players to be a reasonable gaming experience.  Cue the appearance of Di Renjie on Kickstarter.  My husband saw the game come up and immediately thought of me always wanting to play Clue but never having the opportunity.

So the game.  Di Renjie is a deduction based card game where you are an inspector trying to determine the target, weapon, and location of an impending assassination.  It is cooperative in the sense that all of the players collectively must guess the correct combination in order to stop the assassination.  Yet it still has an element of competitiveness in that you gain points in a few different ways and can be the most successful inspector in a group of victorious gamers.

What makes this game superior to Clue, other than an more intriguing theme, is the mechanisms of the game. In Di Renjie, the mechanisms of the game make it difficult if not impossible (meaning no one I've played it with yet has managed this) to know the entire solution to the game before everyone is required to do so.  This drastically reduces the possibility that I will come up with a strategy that always wins me the game making it no fun for the other players.  If the outcome is always known and always the same, a lot of the fun is lost.

Another superior mechanism is the ability to deceive within the constraints of the rules.  Sometimes, deception is even mandatory!  So even when you gain information and clues about the targets, weapons, and locations, you don't always know how reliable the information is.  There is a way to investigate the reliability of the clues, but you can't use it very frequently.

And I also love that this game actually works well with 2 players.  Since our son is only 2 1/2 years old, my husband and I are a little short on available gamers.  We are always looking for games that scale well with 2-4 players, and this is a game that clearly accomplishes this.

Of course, this game also has an element of randomness that drives a lot of game play as well.  So this a competitive cooperative game requiring lucky strategies.  Lots of fun and definitely a keeper.  Glad we funded it and can't wait to play it with even more people!