There aren’t a lot of deduction games that I enjoy. At least, competitive deduction games. I really enjoy solo logic puzzles, but when deduction becomes a competition, I freeze up and my brain becomes a puddle. It probably doesn’t help that the people who make up my regular game group are brutally smart, I always feel like I’m playing catch up. It’s probably because they’re SO much older than me.

Sorry, I’m off track. Cryptid is a deduction game by Hal Duncan and Ruth Veevers and published by Osprey Games in 2018. Playing Cryptid is quite straightforward. The concept is there is a Cryptid on the map, and each player wants to be the one to discover it. To facilitate this, all players are given a single clue pertaining to where the Cryptid could be, and when all the clues are collated, only one hex on the board satisfies all players clues.

Players take turns asking each other if the Cryptid could exist in a specific hex. If yes, a disc goes down. If no, a cube goes down. When someone thinks they know where the cryptid is, they announce their search by placing their own disc on that space, then all players either place a disc or a cube. If all players placed a disc, the searching player is declared the winner.

The first thing that pops is Cryptid’s map. It’s eye-catching! Vibrant colours depicting 5 different terrain types, and really, hexes always look good. A handful of wooden landmarks dot the landscape, and getting closer to the board, you’ll find animal tracks in the bear and cougar habitats. Everything is distinct and clear, which is vital, as the last thing you want getting in your way while playing Cryptid is hard to parse information.

The clues that get doled out have to do with proximity. Things like “Within 1 hex of a water space” or “within 2 spaces of a cougar habitat” or “on either swamp, or mountain” Each of these clues gives players a tiny slice of the puzzle, something that whittles the potential spaces down by ~60%. It’s kind of fascinating that with these clues, only a single hex on the board satisfies all the conditions. I keep expecting to find a fault, an instance where there’s more than one hex, but it’s true, every time.

Cryptid should flow quickly. Each turn is simply pointing to a hex, and asking a player “Here?” and receiving your answer with either a cube or disc. Unfortunately, as with any game that has significant cognitive load, player turns can drag on as they sit with their head in their hands trying to figure out the perfect space to ask a question.

There’s risk in asking a question. If the query returns a ‘no’, then you must also place a cube somewhere else on the board, giving all players more information about your clue. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s the real goal of the game. Figuring out what everyone else’s clue is, and finding that single hex that satisfies all the clues.

My brain burned while playing Cryptid. I struggled to keep all the other players clues in my head all at the same time. It was also a very quiet game, where we all just sat staring at the board, sometimes grunting as a cube or disc got placed, until finally the search happened, and the cryptid was discovered. But then an explosion of discussion on what we all thought each other’s clue was, made for quite a good experience.

I hold some reservations toward Cryptid that are not its fault. Things like, if a player misinterprets their rule and makes a mistake with their cube, it can completely break the game. Also, if you play with others who are incredibly logical, there’s nothing that’s going to help you overcome your opponents. All the information is right out on the board, and a players’ ability to parse the information is what determines the winner here.

Cryptid is a pretty little puzzle. There isn’t much variety to the gameplay, each time you shake up the map and drop new landmark locations, but that’s about it for discovery. It’s the kind of game that can be likened to a Sudoku, it’s a great puzzle, but every time you come to this game, it’s going to give you the exact same experience. That’s not a negative, but it will feel worn after several plays in quick succession.

It’s kind of fascinating to read some of the BGG forums, where people claim to have written a python script that can reliably find the Cryptid within just 2 turns. If you were inspired, you could train yourself and figure out the key to this puzzle. I’ve also seen a lot of people who have created deduction sheets to lessen the cognitive load of keeping each player’s clues in your head. Personally, I feel that the choice to omit deduction sheets from the game was intentional. Most of the game is happening inside your head, the workout of deducing the location is a huge part of the experience. Relegating that whole part of the game to paper turns Cryptid from a cerebral puzzle, to a checklist.

As I said above, deduction games are not my forte. Cryptid is an excellent game for those who like deduction puzzles. At the end of the day, I’d happily play Cryptid again, but it’s not one that I’ll ever be requesting to play. I much prefer Alchemists, where if my deductions fail, there are more game elements for me to focus on. I can still publish my findings, and in the event of catastrophe, poison a student for my own enjoyment.