Gumshoe: The Hard-Boiled Detective in the Thirties

Gumshoe: The Hard-Boiled Detective in the Thirties is a 1985 tabletop game published by Sleuth Publications.

Gameplay

Gumshoe: The Hard-Boiled Detective in the Thirties is a game in which the players are operatives of the Continental Detective Agency in the foggy streets of 1930s San Francisco. Set across a fictional week, each game day opens with a new mystery drawn from corrupt cops, jazz-club murders, vanished heirs, and frame-ups with red herrings. Each morning, players decide their next move across the city's labyrinthine geography, consulting numbered clues, poring over fingerprint reports, newspaper clippings, autopsy results, and phone directories. Branching clues can spiral into car chases or stakeouts, and everything consumes precious in-game time tracked on a daily pad. While inner-city travel takes no time, reaching the foggy outskirts costs hours, demanding forethought and tactical movement. There is no scoring system—only intuition and judgment. Players must decide when it is time to attempt to solve a case, guided by an optional question book that sometimes slips in spoilers.[1]

Publication history

Shannon Appelcline stated that Sleuth Publications had previously published Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which "won the SdJ (Game of the Year) award in Germany in 1985 - the same year that Sleuth published Gumshoe (1985), which took the game's ideas to San Francisco in the 1930s."[2]: 343 

Reception

J. Michael Caparula reviewed Gumshoe: The Hard-Boiled Detective in the Thirties for Different Worlds magazine and stated that "If you're an armchair detective that loves the Hammett thrillers, if you've just finished your umpteenth viewing of The Maltese Falcon, here at last is a game for you."[1]

Reviews

References

  1. ^ a b Caparula, J. Michael (Fall 1987). "Game Reviews". Different Worlds (47): 33.
  2. ^ Shannon Appelcline (2014). Designers & Dragons: The '80s. Evil Hat Productions. ISBN 978-1-61317-081-6.
  3. ^ https://archive.org/details/AdventurerMagazine04_20190329/Adventurer%20magazine/Adventurer%20Magazine%2001/page/n21/mode/2up
  4. ^ https://archive.org/details/games-69-1985-november/mode/2up
  5. ^ https://archive.org/details/games811986november/mode/2up
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