Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Carlton House & Queen’s Park

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 5 out of 10

   Casterdain

   a dizzying catastrophe made out of a very enjoyable and unique game. there are 2 main problems: 1) the quality of the text on the page. the publisher reportedly didn't engage the services of an english speaking copyeditor, and it is apparent: the text is just the raw output of their bizarre english->french->english translation pipeline. the most common artifact of this is characters hopping into "fiacres", not carriages, and butlers have all become "majordomos" - but odd google translate word changes are injected into every paragraph. a lawyer once casually explained a "diktat" bestowing a "usufruct" to us. immersion is zero, especially if you're playing in a group and need to try reading this out loud. you could try making a drinking game out of how many times you google words for clarity to spice it up but someone might die of alcohol poisoning. 2) very poorly edited material changes to the cases themselves. i would go so far as to call them "case breaking", they are too disruptive to your ability to hypothesize. a major clue in the last case we tried was attributed to a mysterious third party because (we later found) they had changed his name from the original for no apparent reason, leaving us chasing his ghost. later, the solution for that case told us a main character sold the item he pilfered... to himself. my wife and i felt so ridiculous when we read that, with our pages of notes. why were we taking this so seriously? maybe SHCD wasn't meant to be taken seriously. this box set was our first experience with the game, who were we to know? fortunately we discovered the existence of the original english versions, and dropped this before it could ruin anymore cases for us. its since become a favorite, but only in spite of this set.

2. 8.5 out of 10

   Emsdad

   Carlton House is a fantastic addition, giving a new twist to the cases. Haven't tried the Queen's Park case yet, but looks intriguing. Only downside is some easily avoidable typos and translation goofs, which is annoying rather than anything else.

3. 9 out of 10

   BradyLS

   Despite its reputation, we are having a grand time with the Carlton House and Queen's Park cases. The manse is a particularly inspired idea as so many of Holmes' cases in the canon took place in them.