WBG Score: 6
Player Count: 2-6
Published by: Space Cowboys
Designed by: Matthew Dunstan, Dave Neale
This is a review copy. See our review policy here
As you can see from the low score Perspectives wasn’t a game for us. I'm going to get into why but considering a lot of people love this one you might say that we have a different…perspective on things. You know, if we did emojis on this site even I would be tempted to put the head in hands one for that.
How to see things from a different angle.
The first thing you're presented with is instructions on how to use the tutorial. This is basically a puzzle that uses the edges of the bottom of the box. It won’t take long so give it a go to get a flavour of how the next cases will play out.
When you're ready for your first case (there are three in the box) take the envelope and pull out the folder for act one. This will give you the start of the story and instructions on how to play the game. This will tell you to deal out the cards (keep them in order) to players until they’ve all been dealt out as evenly as possible. Players will keep their cards secret from each other. You’ll then be presented with a main question. Players then take it in turns to describe what’s on their cards to the other players.
You then get to discussing each other's cards and the case and trying to deduce what you all think the answer to the question is. At any time you can all decide to reveal one card from someone’s hand to the table for free. You can reveal more but each one will lose you one point at final scoring. When you think you know the answer, flip over the act folder. There will be other questions once you’ve got the main answer. Once you’ve answered these and got your score, move onto the next act. Keep going until you’ve completed all the acts and add up your final score. Then, onto the next case.
Do you see what I see?
If you’ve read any of my reviews then you’ll know that I love a good puzzle game. I
play the bulk of them with my daughter, partly because I need some brains on the team but mainly because we just love cracking open a new puzzle and experiencing everything these games have to offer and having the satisfaction of solving them together. Thankfully there have been more hits than misses. Perspective was unfortunately one of those rare misses for us.
As we played through the first case it became apparent that this just wasn’t for us. We realised that the main hook, the main premise of having hidden information just isn’t how we like to solve these puzzles. We like having the information in front of us so we can interact with what’s been presented to us when we want to. We like the freedom of trying to crack a piece of evidence or a puzzle together, or just grabbing different things and working on some things on our own. We like having those little epiphany moments and grabbing a piece of evidence to try and confirm our theory and the fact that we couldn’t immediately do all of that here felt too restrictive for us. It was like we were working together but also not. Now, obviously that sort of restriction is the whole point of Perspectives. It’s making everyone get involved and for that I can’t fault it. I’ve been in multiplayer puzzle games before and lets just say that more isn’t exactly merrier in some cases.
It did get to a point though where we kept asking “what was on that card again?” Or “was there anything else that we’ve missed?” It got to a point where I felt like I was being annoying asking the same things over and over again, even though we were writing stuff down. There is the option to reveal a card and even more cards for a cost in points at the end and even though we don’t always keep score with the games (we just like the thrill of the solve) it would have felt almost like cheating to me.
I’d be interested in hearing what people's sweet spot for this game was in terms of player count. At two it felt that maybe six cards each was too many and felt a bit laborious to describe and pay attention to everything being described. On the other hand I wonder if at six players two cards is too few? Especially if both of your cards are “solved” pretty quickly. Let me know.
A fresh new angle
With all of the above being said and how we felt about the game I do want to say that I don’t think Perspectives is a bad game. You only have to look at Board Game Geek and the wealth of positive scores to see that people really love this game. Despite it not being our style I think that the idea of the limited information does give a different and interesting spin on the puzzle game genre. As I said before it does a great job of getting every player involved in some capacity. Even if you feel that you're someone who isn't good at solving the puzzles, the way you get your piece of information across could be incredibly important to solving something and that in itself could be a great confidence boost for someone.
I generally prefer these sorts of games at a lower player count but this is one I’d actually think could benefit more players. It’s designed with group interaction in mind and could even fall into the territory of a party game as you constantly share information and banter across the table, especially if you're a group who know each other and have been playing a lot of co-op games together.
Needless to say, I doubt we’ll be diving back into the perspectives pool anytime soon but, if anything I’ve said about this sounds appealing to you or sounds like something that your group would absolutely love then I would have no problem recommending it.
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