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.
“…and the playtime clocks in at about three, maybe four hours.”
I snapped out of my dream-like state as I listened to the overview of Guilty: Houston 2015 (2024, IELLO) while standing with other media members at the IELLO presentation at SPIEL 2023. One look at the box and the format—a one-shot, cooperative card-driven murder mystery game which can be fully reset and aligns with many of the games I have reviewed over the last four years—and I was pre-sold on IELLO’s approach.
But, “three, maybe four hours?”
That timing felt too long. Most of the game series I have covered for Meeple Mountain that fit the one-shot/escape room/mystery games, such as Suspects, Cold Case, Unsolved Case Files, Alibi: 3 Intricate Mysteries, echoes, and so many other properties, play in anywhere from an hour to maybe two hours in duration. Guilty: Houston 2015 was threatening to double that.
I immediately thought about how to sell this to my fellow lead investigator at home—my wife—given that the game would definitely be a Friday night date activity that we couldn’t start until 9 PM, after the kids go to bed.
Ultimately, she stepped up to the plate because she knows that you, dear reader, need to know if Guilty: Houston 2015 is a trip worth taking. I’m happy to report that it is, thanks to an approach that addresses the only thing I don’t like about the Suspects franchise: no dead weight. (Well, besides the dead body, of course.)
Orange is Both the Old and the New Black
Guilty: Houston 2015 is a deck-driven crime thriller for as many players as you’d like to host at the table. Using a card system that tracks time in 20-minute increments, players take on the role of detective Theodora “TD” Yates over the course of a single night. The task? Solve the murder of inmate Julia Kowalski—who happens to be the daughter of a famous politician—before a hastily-arranged press conference takes place the following morning.
The game’s cast of characters is many, but focuses on four key suspects, many of whom are ripped from the headlines and/or other famous prison movie/TV show properties. The property that first came to mind: Orange is the New Black, right down to the fact that the box cover is literally drawn in the colors orange, white and black. (Coincidence? Maybe. But it is hard to escape the similarities, and I haven’t even watched the show!)
Guilty: Houston 2015 asks players to dig up enough evidence to be prepared for the press conference. Certainly, you’ll need to figure out how Julia ended up dead in a prison shower, but other questions surface that need to be answered as well. There are also some puzzle-elements to the crime fighting that will help players answer some of the questions posed by reporters during the press conference, with a scoring system that yields an ending aligned with how well players do.
Gimme That
Guilty: Houston 2015’s story arc was really good, with lots of little twists and turns that kept my wife and I engaged throughout the case. This was doubly surprising for my wife, who usually begins the slow fade towards bedtime around 11 PM but the game had us going right up through about midnight, three hours after we started playing.
That arc and the way clues come to light kept the mid game moving briskly. At points, we thought we had a bead on where the story was going—playing a lot of these games will do that!—before a twist revealed by a time card or by a discovery tied to evidence in one of the game’s locations changed things up a bit.
The Guilty system uses a small board used to arrange evidence by suspect and by location, but for upcoming Guilty games, I would likely bring a notepad to take additional notes as well. (The game’s instructions suggest this, but we thought we were too cool to do silly things like, you know, write things down!) With the board layout, it was easy to go back to re-read certain clues or track evidence by timestamps or pictures, so kudos on that part of Guilty’s production.
But the best thing about Guilty: Houston 2015? Every card we revealed mattered in the end. This is not a spoiler. The game’s instructions say this too, but some of the other one-shot games we’ve tried have a lot of empty clues that provide both no information and cause you to waste your limited time. This was especially true in the Suspects games, where you might reveal a card only to learn nothing new and find yourself closer to the threshold where you would end play with a lower score thanks to the total number of revealed cards.
In the end, we thought that the game’s solution didn’t quite line up with the evidence we had found, so we finished play with an ending that was not the “perfect” ending to the case. I’m sure there are clues we missed, because the solution cards revealed during the press conference tell you specifically where you should have been able to pick up on certain clues based on dialogue between characters or other notes. I don’t think this was due to the second glass of wine, but it might have been!
As a system, though? Big fan of what Guilty: Houston 2015 is going for here. I picked up Guilty: Monaco 1955—game #2 in the Guilty series—at SPIEL 2024 so I’m excited to get that to the table in the months ahead.
And, my wife? Not only did she fight through a longer game than normal, she wants us to speed Guilty: Monaco 1955 to the table.
More Guilty games? Yes, please!
Guilty: Houston 2015 details
- Designer: Yohan Servais
- Artists: Jocelyn 'Joc' Millet
- Publishers: IELLO
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 99
- Age range : 16+
- Time range : 180 - 240 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Deduction, Narrative Choice / Paragraph
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.86847 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Guilty: Houston 2015.
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