First Impression: Criminals

By W. Eric Martin
July 31, 2007

Publisher: Robot Martini
Designer: Kory Heath
Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Price: $4
Rules Languages: English

Game Played: Prototype & final version
Number of Plays: Three times with six players

The easiest way to sum up Criminals is to quote designer Kory Heath’s goal when creating the game: “Criminals was an attempt to create a Werewolf-style game which could be played with just a handful of people and no moderator.”

Heath has succeeded on all of these points—which makes it hard for me to give an objective opinion of the game as I’m (a) horrible at role-playing and (b) equally horrible at reading bluffs and body language. I’ll do my best to lay out the game and let you take it from there.

How to Play
Each of the 3-6 players in Criminals is, as you might guess, an insurance salesman. No, wait, make that a criminal. Each of you has committed a different crime, and your leader—who is dubbed simply The Crime Boss—has committed a crime of his own as well. (These crimes form a deck of seven cards; for each player fewer than six, you remove one crime from the deck.) The cops have scooped all of you up and are trying to get you to rat on one another so they can bust the right people.

Each player has a color-coded set of seven alibi cards. (If you remove crime cards from the deck, each player removes those alibi cards as well.) At the start of the game, each player is dealt a crime card, with one left over for the Boss, and the players place the alibi card for their particular crime in the center of the table. Then these crime cards, along with the Boss’ crime, are shuffled together.

To start a round, one of the crime cards is revealed, then players debate, negotiate, collaborate, and otherwise determine who might have committed this crime. Players are free to lie and point fingers at whomever they choose, and as soon as half the number of players (rounded up) point to the same person, that person has been Sold Out by his fellow felons. If he can’t reveal an alibi card for this crime, he’s guilty of the crime and eliminated from the game; if he can reveal the alibi card, however, he can either pass (in which case the crime card is placed on the bottom of the crime deck) or he can Finger someone else for this crime. If he Fingers someone, then either he’s eliminated from the game (if the Fingered party is actually innocent) or he immediately wins (if the Fingered party is guilty). Fingering is a big risk, in other words.

You cycle through the crime deck round by round, with a player or two being eliminated and many alibi cards being revealed. Players can also decide to Sell Out or Finger the Crime Boss. The game ends immediately if this happens, and there be a single winner or multiple winners depending on the Boss’ guilt or innocence.

Who Did the What Now?
While I’m good at Time’s Up and other party games where you try to make players guess things, Werewolf and other games where you need to keep others from guessing concealed information throw me for a loop. I can’t keep a straight face, and I’m hopeless at reading the faces of others for tells.

I played a somewhat different version of Criminals at a game convention, a version that involved a point scoring system and multiple games to determine a winner. I started laughing whenever anyone accused me of anything—or even mentioned my name—so it was more like I was sucking on a tube of laughing gas than playing a game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but in terms of having the game work, I was as useful as a demented spider monkey.

Even worse, it seemed that the first round of Criminals, like Werewolf, was completely random, with players having to take action for no reason other than that the success of the game depended on it. Theoretically, you could sit and stare at each other for hours, trying to read people’s face for clues.

“It’s true that these games are not for everyone,” says Heath. “But in the right group, I definitely don’t think the first round (or subsequent rounds) are entirely random. You can figure out a lot by talking and listening to others talk. You’re correct that a round could theoretically last for hours, and in fact we learned that this is a very good strategy in Werewolf—because the guilty eventually crack—so we always play that game with timed rounds. Criminals seems to move a bit more quickly.”

Playing the Criminals game as published, our group ran into a different problem. We cycled slowly through the deck a couple of times until players started feeling bold enough to Finger someone. Eventually we ended up with only two players left, and the rules didn’t make clear what to do at that point if neither of us had revealed an alibi for the revealed crime. We couldn’t each just point at the other person, could we? Luckily, I had already laid an alibi card for the crime that was revealed, which put me in the position of Selling Out the other player or the Boss. I chose poorly.

As I said, I’m not a fan of this type of game and hope the description above will let you know whether being a Criminal appeals to you.

Kory Heath did ask to add this note about the game: “One thing I want to mention about Criminals is that it’s really not a solo design. I had a basic rule-set when I went to the Gathering of Friends in 2007, but in subsequent weeks, the design crew in Maryland completely reworked it into the Robot Martini version. At that time I was still living back in California and couldn’t participate much in the design. Dave Chalker took the reins during that portion of the project, and if the game is published again, we’re going to bill it as a co-design.”

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