Brindlewood Bay is a mystery game
So, played a one-shot of Brindlewood Bay yesterday, which will now turn into a campaign. I'm not the most grandma-coded person, but it was a lot of fun!
Having never played BB, but having read both it and the immense amount of discourse online about it, I knew about the great divide of people saying you didn't actually solve any mysteries while playing. Now, after playing it, I'm going to firmly declare that while I still see where they are coming from, that place seems quite ill-informed. It's like saying "if I have to roll to determine the damage of my attack, all the process of choosing my weapon, when to hit, who to hit and where on the battlefield to be is not actually playing combat"1.
We were moving post-its around, drawing diagrams with the suspects, debating possibilities, deciding which clues were red-herrings... When we rolled to see if our solution was correct, it wasn't! And if we had been able to construct a case with a couple more clues, it would have been! Every single person on the table was clearly engaging with the game while both trying to "tell a mystery story" and "solve a mystery", despite a lot of the internet trying to make it seem like that is an incompatible binary.
Character count inspired by Isaac's post this morning. Go try out some games!
anb
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Not saying people can't have that take, I just have a guess that it's a take people complaining about BB's mystery system don't have.↩