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.
I want to start with a declaration: I love “one-shot”, single play, mystery-in-a-box board games, so much that I’ve reviewed more than a dozen for this website. I would like to think that means I know this category extraordinarily well, with reviews of the Cold Case games, the Unsolved Case Files series, Exit: The Game, Masters of Crime: Vendetta, one of the Unlock! games (Legendary Adventures), Alibis: 3 Intricate Mysteries, echoes: The Cursed Ring, three of the Suspects games, and a few others.
This is a category I love. It’s also easy to love it, because these are some of the only games I can consistently get my wife to play, since they make for a fun date night at home. However, nothing burns me more than working my way through a one-shot game and then feeling like the game didn’t do enough to drop the proverbial bread crumbs in the right spots at the right moments.
Enter Guilty: Monaco 1955. The second in the new mystery game series from IELLO—following the very strong Guilty: Houston 2015—Guilty: Monaco 1955 does a few things right, with its deck-driven time mechanic featuring a load of real-world flavor text based on the history of the time period, and an almost comical amount of real-world characters featured in the main story.
(By the time I was interacting with the oceanographer extraordinaire Jacques Cousteau or interacting with a diamond dealer who happened to be the son of Louis-Francois Cartier, I had to laugh. The name dropping in Guilty: Monaco 1955 makes for a fun, cinematic experience brought to tabletop.)
But the world building is so much better than the mystery in this game…and worse, I still don’t really know what happened as we tallied our final score. That’s in part because my wife and I thought the crime fighting element of the game’s story deduction was a miss…and it was in part because the only way we could find the ending for this game was by simply skimming through the story deck to find the answer.
Uhh…no!
Spoiler-Free in 1955
Here’s the setup. Players take on the role of Lt. Colonel Joseph Gailleton, newly promoted commander of the local police force, known as the Monaco Carabiniers. It’s late morning on Sunday, May 22nd, 1955, and later that afternoon, the annual Monaco Grand Prix is set to begin. The race quickly becomes secondary, as your focus must quickly pivot to a series of events that involves the Prince of Monaco, missing gems, and a large assortment of suspects to interrogate. By the end of the day, you’ve got to answer a lot of questions, and not much time to answer them!
Like the previous Guilty game, Guilty: Monaco 1955 has a boatload of suspicious characters to look into, puzzles to solve, and a notebook system that pushes players to form links between certain elements of the investigation. The big difference is that the Guilty games take a LOT longer to finish than other comparable experiences.
Many one-shot games take about an hour, maybe 90 minutes, and actually penalize players for taking longer than that. Guilty: Monaco 1955 goes in the opposite direction and states it right on the box: you will need 3-4 hours to solve the riddle here, and the instructions remind you that you won’t even get to all the story and time cards used to socialize evidence in that amount of time.
That’s a long sit, folks. I basically had to trick my wife into playing the first Guilty game. Luckily, because that first run went so well, I had to beg just a hair less than normal to get her to sign off on a second run. But by the beginning of our third hour navigating Guilty: Monaco 1955, we still had no idea where the story was going or how we were going to answer the final solutions to the case.
This is both a feature and a bug. I liked not necessarily knowing where the story was trying to take me. Then again, for all the cinematics on display here, I really don’t want to sit through the three-and-a-half hours of a real-world film like The Brutalist. Eventually, I want to take all the notes, all the characters we’ve met, and all the mini-puzzle answers to put them into a solution.
That’s not really possible here. Also, unlike Guilty: Houston 2015, Guilty: Monaco 1955 had a few dead ends. This makes the entire affair feel a little longer than I would like, in a game that already overstays its welcome by 30-60 minutes.
Envelop My Feelings (In An Envelope)
Guilty: Monaco 1955 does itself one major disservice: it doesn’t just tell you what happened, with a majestic reveal at the end of play.
Like a lot of other games in this category, players can score points based on how well they answer end-game investigation questions. Great. This is a game you can only play once, but I still love a good high-score challenge. But during one portion of the ending, the game asks for players to line up a specific answer to a specific question by using one of the cards they should have previously discovered from one of the decks.
But what if you don’t have that card? We didn’t, so we found ourselves in a terrible position: we simply had to go through all the cards at the end of the story deck, looking for a card that would tell us the answer to our question.
The Suspects games get this part right: the designers know that I’ve worked through a lot of theories, and now I want to open an envelope and read a solution. Bingo bango…each case in Suspects has an envelope. You open it, and you get to see how you did.
I didn’t think Guilty: Houston 2015 needed that, so maybe I didn’t realize that this was a thing all of these games needed. Now? No doubt about it, the Guilty games need a clearer way to ensure players who have invested 4+ hours have an easy way to see how they did.
Guilty: Monaco 1955 is clearly the harder game of the two in the series. But after we did find the cards, we needed to ensure that we knew what happened. There were still a couple of somewhat wild logical reach/stretch moments to get to the final solution. I won’t address these here, but I think even the designer knows that it will be challenging to imagine the majority of players getting to the final answers in a reasonable way. (That link takes you to a spoiler page on BGG, entered by the game’s designer, Yohan Servais.)
Sometimes, that works! I’m all for games like this being really hard, especially if you label a game as “advanced”, “expert”, etc. But some of the answers here didn’t quite jive with what we saw, and that left us scrambling to even figure out what the game was hoping for players to see.
Guilty: Monaco 1955 is still worth a look for escape room/one-shot mystery game diehards. But save for the solid system these games reside upon, the story and the mystery in Guilty: Monaco 1955 was a disappointment. Given how much we loved Guilty: Houston 2015, I will happily play more Guilty games in the future, but it’s hard to recommend this second entry.
Guilty: Monaco 1955 details
- Designer: Yohan Servais
- Artists: Adrien Rives, Jocelyn 'Joc' Millet
- Publishers: IELLO
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 99
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 180 - 240 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Deduction, Narrative Choice / Paragraph
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.42727 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Guilty: Monaco 1955.
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