Posted in: Board Games, Games, Review | Tagged: 3 Secrets, dV Giochi, game review

Everyone's Got Something Twisted To Hide In '3 Secrets'

The last of the games we recently received from dV Giochi is a nifty little card game called 3 Secrets. I personally tried this game out with several groups because the reactions were so mixed that I needed time for it to sit. After a couple weeks of games, I'm ready to give this one a proper review.

3 Secrets is a cooperative investigation card game for 2-8 players with ages 14+, but considering some of the content in the game, I'd bet some would want that age pushed up to 18+. You and your friends all play detectives who are trying to figure out what the secrets are to each card. Each round, one of you is the undercover agent who goes into the deck and picks out a random card while everyone else plays detectives. You can shuffle the deck or choose your level of difficulty, whichever you feel most comfortable with. The undercover agent reads the back of the card to themselves to get all the information about the story of the character on the front and what all of the secrets are.

The front of the card shows a single image of a person committing a criminal act. Using the card we've shown above we've chosen one of the easy cases with Carlo, who has vegetables, a cash register, and a lock all shaded green. These are the items that have secrets to them. The undercover agent knows what the secrets are and serves as the game master for that round, while everyone else tries to guess the secrets using yes or no questions. The agent can only answer Yes, No, Not Exactly, or It Is Irrelevant to help you figure things out. You have five minutes for each secret and once you guess one, you get a fresh five minutes to guess the next. If time runs out on a secret, you start over with a new five minutes, but you can only guess one or two secrets and the third is lost.

3 Secrets can be rough at times, as every is throwing questions at you that may or may not help the group. Keep in mind that the game is a group effort, there are no winners or losers, it's simply showing off your skills at deductive reasoning. Theoretically, everyone should be working toward a greater goal, but you often find people with different trains of though going off in different directions that don't help at all, and it tends to slow the game down and confuse people.

The game is color-coded so that as you go up the rainbow the difficulty gets harder. Green is the easiest and purple is the hardest. As they get harder, the secrets get more outlandish. You deal with everything from murder to theft to robbery to blackmail to incest to cannibalism to psychological torture. Some of the clues are outright ridiculous and could not be guessed unless someone went on an insane thought path to get there, which makes playing the game sometimes upsetting because you end up with secrets where you ask out loud "How the hell were we supposed to guess that?!" Even some of the clues on the back of the card that you can give people for a penalty are the opposite of what's happening, making things confusing at best.

The game also comes with a free app you can download to make things easier for the agent and gives everyone a timer they can watch to see how much is remaining on the clock to guess what's happening. It adds a bit of tension to the game and makes the clock a much more important feature than if you were just using a stopwatch.

The biggest problem the game has going for it is that there are people who absolutely hate the format. When you break it down, it's an extended version of 20 Questions, only for solving crimes. Of all the groups I played with, only a small portion of those people weren't frustrated by the end of the night. It's understandable when you're trying to solve a crime and just can't come up with the answer, but it proved to me that it takes a certain group of people to play this for enjoyment and not become bored or angry with it.

I personally enjoyed 3 Secrets and plan to play this as much as I can before I end up knowing all the secrets in the game. That being said, I can also see where some people will despise it. I recommend it, but be sure you're playing it with people who love to solve mysteries and are not automatically put off by not getting it right immediately.

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