Crimes and Capers: Lady Leona’s Last Wishes

Review

Game Description

“Who gets the fortune? It’s 1919 at the Langford Estate. Lady Leona has died and absolutely no one is sad about it. She was forever threatening to write people out of her will. Now that she is finally gone, her closest family and favored servants have gathered for the reading of her will. But Leona always loved two things: Puzzles and Making Life Difficult.”

Personal Experience

I had a friend in town and we decided to play a puzzle game while she was here. Lady Leona’s Last Wishes had been languishing on my to play shelf for some time, so we picked that to play through.

What the game box doesn’t do a good idea of describing on the outside of the box is that this is more of a puzzle party game. It’s intended to be a puzzle game that you can play with a bigger group. To be fair, the game does list a player count of 4-6 players and we should have probably heeded that, as it was a very thin experience for two people. Overall, it took us about 40 minutes to play through and solve the mystery.

Narrative

The story features six characters vying for an inheritance, each of which has their own character journal describing their view of events that you’re meant to decipher. We each played two characters and took turns reading from the character journals in fun character voices. This made up the bulk of the experience, so fortunately it was fun.

There’s also some followup information for each character, plot twists that feed into the second puzzle of the game. However there was no followup to them. We both would have liked to see a little more resolution or followup for the characters. Some sort of denouement after the game to give these characters a little more personality and story.

Puzzle Play

Unfortunately the puzzle play of the game consists of exactly two puzzles. I’m sure this was designed this way to ensure that a large group of players would have time to finish in one sitting, but it made for a very light experience.

Neither puzzle was terribly exciting, both spelled out how to solve the puzzle and just required reading through the journals and making careful notes of the relevant details. The second puzzle was technically intended to be competitive, which we both half-heartedly embraced. All of the components were well-produced however.

None of the puzzles required distinguishing between colors. Hints are available on the game’s webpage if needed.

Recommendation

Overall, this game really didn’t do it for me, so I can’t really recommend it. Though if you do play, make sure you’ve got at least the 4-6 people advised on the box.