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 enlisted the help of the world’s greatest in-house board game detective–my wife–to join me on yet another run at achieving high-score glory, thanks to the 2021 deduction game Masters of Crime: Vendetta (KOSMOS), the first in a line of four longer co-op mystery games where 1-6 players try to solve a murder.
If you have had the chance to read any previous mystery game content, you know how much I love these games. It’s an easy excuse for my wife and I to pour a glass of wine and spread (fake) evidence all over our kitchen table. KOSMOS, publisher of the Exit: The Game series, is in familiar territory with Vendetta, and after a half-dozen different plays of a few base Exit games as well as two of the Exit: Advent Calendar games, I was excited to give Vendetta a spin.
Vendetta places players in the role of the most loyal capo in Don Lorenzo Russo’s criminal network. It’s March 16th, 2021, and an unspeakable act has taken the life of Don Russo’s son Marco. The don doesn’t trust anyone, even his own children, to find out what happened, so over the course of a single day, your task is to work the family’s network of dirty cops, criminals, and hangers-on to find out what happened to Marco and report back to the don.
Admittedly, this setup sounded kinda bland. I’m a sucker for anything mob-related, but this felt like the script for three thousand different mob movies and dirty cop thrillers. (If this was a movie, I would still watch it, even if the premise sounded predictable.) To the game’s credit, it leans hard into its theme, with so many references to the great Mafia films of the last 50 years that it made my head spin.
The deduction elements were very interesting. That started with the game’s interface. Players will spend a lot of time looking up clues using the Masters of Crime website along with analyzing puzzles that advance the story. The various characters and locations are not gated in Vendetta like they are in other games. The instructions indicate that players will have to visit every location in the game, so working through the deck of about 75 cards is a requirement.
That deck is fun, too, because it uses a “choose your own adventure” approach that rewards attentive players with a star system used at the end of the game to determine the group’s score. Leaning hard into your character is also rewarded nicely here, a nice touch in a game where my wife and I had to embrace playing a mobster with questionable moral character! Some puzzles require looking up real-world locations, too. Two of the best puzzles in the game were tied to doing what felt like an actual investigation, with the kinds of tools that might really be available to a capo if he was snooping around for details on a murder.
Vendetta gets almost every production element right. Through the use of small envelopes that feature clues, to fake websites that provide further insights into some events leading to Marco’s death, Vendetta really nails the details for a short, 2-3 hour crime experience. We both loved the artwork—Jens Bringmann and Valentin Kopetzki probably had a lot of fun bringing criminals, New York City locations, and images as simple as character tattoos to life for this game, and it shows, giving the game a nice element of world-building.
One thing Vendetta gets wrong—the “Detective Board” players use to keep clues, location cards, suspect profiles, and other notes organized. It’s a simple piece of paper that feels cheap and looks shoddy when placed on the table. I get it: Vendetta is a one-shot game where you are writing on some components, making it a little harder to gift to a neighbor without some advance planning. Still, we both thought this production element stood out, but in a negative way.
Otherwise, we had a blast working through most of the puzzles here. The overall difficulty is lower than some of the hardest Exit games, so I would be surprised if a player finished this game with significant complaints about the logical evidence collection required to get from point A to point B. The ending is fun and also offers a nice and completely unnecessary postscript, based on choices made during the game. That was a handsome hoot. There’s a lot of reading and text involved, which made us both think that Vendetta would be best as a solo or maybe two-player game. (No way I’m playing one of these games with six players…too many cooks in a very small kitchen!)
We also appreciated that this is very much a game for adults. Between some adult language and sexual innuendo, the game broadcasts its adult-themed content on the box but follows through when going through evidence and character dialogue.
Masters of Crime: Vendetta is a full-night affair for crime-fighting enthusiasts who are looking for a light-to-medium puzzle challenge in a one-shot mystery game. For about $20, this is a great time at the table!
Masters of Crime: Vendetta details
- Designer: Lukas Setzke, Martin Student, Verena Wiechens
- Artists: Jens Bringmann, Valentin Kopetzki
- Publishers: KOSMOS, Noctis Verlag
- Release Date: 2021
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 120 - 240 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Connections, Cooperative Game, Deduction, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Storytelling
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.60192 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Masters of Crime: Vendetta.
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