Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Allplay has been churning out games almost as fast as our team can play ‘em, so when we had the chance to demo their upcoming word association game Alibis at PAX Unplugged 2024, we couldn’t pass up the chance to preview this new design, set for release in early 2025.
Alibis (designed by Yusuke Sato, the designer of Couture) accommodates 2-6 players who are tasked with—let me check my notes here—trying to ensure that various supervillains have their stories straight, so that the authorities can identify the one true culprit of a crime in each of the game’s three rounds. With a lineup of anywhere from 9-13 criminals, players must work together by providing clues to other players about the identity of their two suspects, in the hopes that all players do this well enough to isolate one of the suspects.
Each of the game’s three rounds play out the same way. Old clue words are wiped, then a single word clue is placed on each suspect in play. Each player is dealt two face-down suspect cards, which means each player is now aligned with two clue words, secret to each player.
Everyone must now write down a single word that will help the other players guess their two suspects and their associated clue words, while also ensuring that their word doesn’t point closely to any other suspect in the game. (This is always the balancing act, isn’t it? No game does this better than Codenames, so those same skills come to light in Alibis.) In a recent play with my family, my two suspects were aligned with the clues “football” and “pants.”
I went with this as my single word hint: uniform.
So, once all players come up with a single word summarizing their clues, all players reveal their clues to the table. Players then have a few minutes to use their clue-tracking, dry-erase board to guess at which words line up with different pairs of suspects.
After this, a scoring round takes place. If even one player correctly matches a player’s clue word with their two suspects, the entire table gets to remove one point (“heat”) from the starting pool. After this is tested for each player, all players reveal who they think the culprit is for that round. (The culprit is the single suspect card that was removed from play before the round.)
Each correct guess removes three more heat for the party. During round cleanup, dry-erase boards are cleared for new data collection, suspects are shuffled and redistributed, and new keywords are placed on each suspect.
At the end of three rounds, the lower the score, the better!
Solid, Until Scoring
If you’ve played the games So Clover! and Codenames, you’ve played 90% of what Alibis has to offer. Now, I can get around the lack of originality here because Alibis is still a good time at the table, especially at the full player count of six. At four players, I thought Alibis was OK, and it was a little easier to guess at the suspect pairs in each round because there are only nine suspects in play, whereas there are 13 suspects in play at the max player count. (I did three plays of Alibis for this review, at four, five, and six player counts.)
The fun of Alibis comes from watching the creativity of the players at the table. How am I going to build a one-word clue that hints at the keywords “golf” and “wolf”? What the heck was that other player going for when he listed his one-word clue, ”decipher”? Across three plays of Alibis, I loved watching people get creative as they tried to combine two disparate words into a single clue.
I did not love the scoring system, though. That’s because the main way to win at Alibis comes down to getting almost every player to correctly guess the culprit every round. The scoring balance for the individual clue guessing—having at least one player correctly guess a suspect pairing from any player—seems out of balance with the end-round scoring. Even when all players have at least one teammate guess their pairing correctly, this might still lead to almost every player getting the culprit wrong.
That means our final scores have always been bad, or worse. That turned the tide in a weird way at each of my plays, including our six-player game at PAXU—the gameplay was fun, but it was strange to feel like the team didn’t play well when reflecting on the final scores.
But if life is a journey, Alibis is a fun journey. As a production, it does the job, and Allplay does great work again by slipping a lot of game into a small box. Alibis will stick around for my extended party plays with larger groups, because I think the game shines best with six players. One thing will change from my prototype copy: the keyword cards will be double-sided. Otherwise, the version I have is essentially final and I think it looks great. Even the dry-erase markers all worked, which my copy of Just One could not claim!
Allplay is on a nice run right now. I’m excited to see what else is in store for 2025!
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