Cryptid Review
Somewhere in this strange, untamed, land there lives a beast hitherto unknown to science. A Cryptid. Sporadic sightings, local folklore. Your research has given you a hint to its location and now you and your competitors have descended upon the region to find it once and for all. And you’re going to awkwardly ask each other questions about what you know until someone does!
Players: 3-5 (and a recent 2 player variant)
Time: 30-50 mins
Designer: Hal Duncan, Ruth Veevers
Artist: Kwanchai Moriya
Publisher: Osprey Games
Deduction games come in many forms. There are cooperative puzzles like the escape room genre games and Sherlock Holmes style mysteries that tend to be of the one and done variety. There are team based competitions of the form of social deduction games or hidden movement chases that rely on human elements to provide the ‘unknown’. But rarely do we get a fully competitive deduction game. With Cryptid, the hunt is finally over.
Here is the patchwork landscape within which the Cryptid lies. On one single hex. No, you’re not going to find it by flailing blindly. But before we discover how we will discover it, take a close look. There are the multiple different terrains. Wooden structures and camps of various colours, and, if you look very carefully, patches of bear and cougar territory. You can tell by the droppings.
It was a disappointment to many of us when first seeing that board after the wonderfully evocative cover. It just seemed so flat, so dare I say it, lifeless. But with play I’ve come to appreciate it. It is functional, and without that prioritising functionality the game would have collapsed. The different elements of the board that are right now so easy to distinguish provide the scaffolding off which the clues hang. Trust me that, when you’re playing, your brain will be pushed to its limit without having to parse the board too.
So, these clues then. Each player comes into the game with a piece of information about where on the board the Cryptid could be. Perhaps in desert or mountain, perhaps with 3 hexes of a blue structure, or 2 hexes of a cougar area. There’s a reasonable but not overwhelming number of possible clues. Which is good, because you’ll need to have a working knowledge of all the possible clues as you play. Only by piecing together everyone else’s clues will you be able to figure out the one spot on the board the Cryptid can be.
Which leads us like a bloodhound to the meat of the game. Asking each other questions. Early in the game you’ll be asking someone “could the Cryptid live here?” plopping the search marker down on an empty hex. And they will quickly double check their clue in their clue booklet because everyone immediately forgets it when asked, and give you a yes or no answer. With a corresponding wooden marker in their player colour dropped in that hex. So now, everyone knows something new. But why can (or can’t) the Cryptid be there? This is the question you will be constantly asking yourself as you cross reference their previous responses with the various nearby elements of the board.
As the game progresses the information on the board builds to a critical mass. And because this is a race the tension builds in step! This is genuinely one of the most tense games I’ve played in recent memory. As I sit hovering halfway off the edge of my seat waiting for my turn so that I can announce a “search” action. This is subtly different. This is how you win.
You start a search by slapping down a disc in a space you know the Cryptid could be. Then the table, already locked in silent thought, somehow descends another notch in volume. Pure focus. Each praying the guess was wrong. You go round the table, one at a time, placing a disc if that place fits your clue. Unless it doesn’t. And then that cube ends the search in failure, and the game goes on. But if every player says yes? Then you’ve found it, a mighty stack of discs signifying your victory. It is just the most magnificent theatre!
The thing is, this works so spectacularly well because the game isn’t just asking you to solve a problem, it’s asking you to solve it faster than everyone else. The race creates the tension. You can’t wait until you’re 100% certain, someone else will win by then. You need to be nearly certain. But being on that precipice, of deciding whether to lay your cards on the table and search, or whether to wait one more round and just ask one more question instead. That is a gaming highlight for me this year.
I’ll include 2018 in ‘this year’ seeing as how that’s when I played it!
It is a decision that goes beyond your own attempts at the solution, but forces you to figure out how close everyone else is. How much you’re giving away by taking a punt. Cryptid is a perfect information deduction game, but they are little elements of bluffing (I can ask about areas I know are wrong), of social deduction (why are they asking about that space? Are they bluffing?) and these extra layers elevate the entire game for me.
However. I need to take a step back and say that while this game speaks to me, it might not speak to you. The spatial puzzle is hard and because it all comes down to parsing the spread of cubes and discs dotting the landscape of mutually overlapping possibilities… it becomes a game of skill that certain people will just be better at. I seem to be very good at it. So I don’t have the perspective of someone trying and failing to put the pieces together. The game is likely only going to be exciting if you at least feel close, like you were just one step away when the game ends.
It’s clear also that a single mistake by any player will ruin the game. Which is an inevitable problem for this design. But is it really unfair to ask players to be responsible as well as to have fun? It’s such a rare thing to require in board gaming. The geometrical nature of the responsibility, being careful to count out spaces across a hex grid from coloured structures while not taking too long and making it obvious that you’re counting out spaces when answering a question, does make it that much more taxing than is perhaps ideal. So this, and the very structure of the game, means it will be better for some people than for others.
It is great for me! And it has been great too for the people I’ve played it with. Each game has ended with everyone around the table excitedly discussing the outcome, what everyone’s clues were, what each of us had worked out. More so than the vast majority of elaborate Euro strategy games, the 20 minute bursts of intense concentration that categorise Cryptid, release so much energy in this flurry of conversation at the end. If you approach Cryptid having an honest desire to solve a puzzle you’ll be able to have a joyful time just sharing that experience whether you win or lose. And I hope that is the secret.
Leave a Reply