-| Once Upon A Crime… Foul Play Card Game Review |-

I’m ridiculously excited for this post today as this is something a little different, this isn’t a blog tour for a book, it’s for a murder mystery card game with fairy tale characters! Yes you heard me right, I’ve had so much fun playing this with my fiancé and my son, who’s enjoyed being our little bad cop (safe to say his favourite cards were the foul play cards where he was able to steal from my hand) I hope you enjoy this little review and if you’re interested in getting your own pack I will leave a link below.
A massive thank you to Zoe for Zooloo’s Book Tours for inviting me and also to After Dark, Foul Play and Zoe for providing me with this pack to play and review for you.
Let’s get started…

Carabosse the Bad Fairy is dead, and her Big Book of Villainy has been stolen!

In a shocking revelation, the magic mirror has revealed that all the suspects are goodies, but who had a motive to go bad? You’ll need to swap, steal and search for the evidence in order to scupper the other detectives and sleuth your way to your happily ever after!

There’s more than one way to catch a killer though. So what’s it gonna be? Good Cop or Bad Cop? These two game versions come with their own set of rules and tactics to crack the case and finger your suspect, but will you use fair play or FOUL PLAY?

The Game is Afoot! Playing as detective, you’ll need to find the three evidence cards that point to a specific suspect in order to catch a killer in this crazy criminal caper. Will you uncover them in the crime scene? Could the other detectives be willing to collaborate and share their findings? Or will you resort to more tricky tactics, and plunder the proof you need to solve this crime?

A game for 2 – 5 players | Age 8 +
£8.95 + p&p

What’s a Murder Mystery Events Company to do?
With a pandemic sweeping the nation and no sign of being able to perform their confounding criminal cabarets or incredible interactive investigations any time soon, they needed to come up with a plan, another way to provide mystery to the masses (and provide income to keep themselves afloat)!
Well, lockdown does strange things to people, especially actors who can’t go out and perform. So one fateful evening, Ben & Lee Cooper-Muir decided to come up with a whole new way to murder people. Keeping their cards close to their chests they plotted and schemed until Foul Play : The Murder Mystery Card Game was born. So, what to do next? This is where After Dark enters the picture. After all, Ben and Lee were two of the operators of the infamous murder mystery company. Maybe they could collaborate to bring the game to the masses. When Lockdown restrictions were eased a top-secret meeting was held with the other criminal masterminds behind After Dark, Helen Burrows, Sophie Webster & Tom Fisher and a pact was made. The game would be launched and licensed under the After Dark banner.  In true After Dark style, the team burst into action and then began the beta testing, design updates, promotional planning, character changes, proofing, proofing and more proofing until finally all the kinks were ironed out, mysteries solved, and FOUL PLAY : Manor House Murder came to life!
The team didn’t stop there though! Due to the popularity of the first game, a second version ‘Once Upon A Crime’ was put on the table, designed, and then launched on Kickstarter. Fully funded in under 48 hours the team at After Dark had another success on their hands and players had another murder in theirs! Once Upon A Crime hits the stores on 1^st July 2021 and Manor House Murder is available to buy too.
We hope you enjoy playing it, and although we all hope to be back performing soon, WATCH THIS SPACE! Now we know we can create and produce games we’ve got a lot more fun things planned for the future! 

After Dark Twitter
Foul Play Twitter
Website

Each pack contains 4 instruction cards, 8 suspect cards, 15 evidence cards and 28 action cards. As said before we have 28 action cards: Crime Scene, Gone Cold, Red Herring, Foul Play, Fair Play, Block and Crime Scene Investigator. Each of these cards has a different action that you can play which is all explained on the instructions.
Can we just take a minute to appreciate how beautiful the art is on these cards, I’m in love with the characters, if that isn’t enough to make you want to play then I don’t know what will.

I’m going to be completely honest with you the first few times I read through the instructions I was a little worried as they seemed a little tricky, this is definitely one of those games you need to play a couple of practice runs to familiarise yourself with the rules. Once I fully understood them that’s when the fun began, we have two ways of playing, ‘good cop’ and ‘bad cop’. Good cop is more serious as we only have 3 pieces of evidence so we are finding the true murderer (which is different each time you play as long as you shuffle all the evidence cards before you set up). Bad cop is more of a strategic game as all 15 evidence cards are played and you don’t necessarily have to find the culprit just the one that fits with the evidence you have collected which is what happened to poor Goldilocks in the picture below, she may not be guilty but she ticked all my evidence boxes.

My son has only just turned 5 (on Saturday) so he’s too young to understand all the different cards but he did play on his daddy’s team and really enjoyed all the fairy tale characters. We already play Top Trumps with him so I think he may pick up the rules of this game soon. Depending on which way you play (and the luck of the cards) you can have a really quick game or a game that lasts a little longer, maybe around 30 minutes. I think this is perfect for in the evenings when you want to just turn off all the screens and spend time having fun with the family. It would also be perfect to take on holidays as its the same size as a deck of cards so it’s easy to travel with.
We really enjoyed this and I would absolutely recommend it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

-Buy Your Pack Here-

Do you have any recommendations for any other detective board/card games?
See you in the next one…