Sleuth - Solve the Mystery of the Missing Gems

In Sleuth a valuable piece of jewelry has been stolen and the players are detectives trying to locate it.

Sleuth consists of two card decks, the "Gem" deck and the "Search" deck. The Gem deck contains 36 cards containing all combinations of gem (diamond, pearl or opal), type (solitaire, pair or cluster) and color (red, blue, green or yellow). Search cards either contain a single gem, type or color or any combination of two elements. At the start of the game, one card is removed from the Gem deck and placed face down. The remaining Gem cards are distributed to the players. Each player also receives four search cards.

On their turn, each player selects one of their search cards and asks another player a question based on it. For a one element card they ask the player how many cards of that type they hold. For a two element card, they ask to see all of the cards in the player's hand which contain both types. They then discard the search card used. When they have used all of their search cards another four are drawn.

As the players gain information about what cards the other players hold they note them on their score sheets. Eventually, they are able to determine what gem is the missing one. The first player to correctly determine the missing gem is the winner.

This is in many ways similar to the game Clue. The players try to determine which item is missing from a known set of items by a process of elimination. Many games have used the formula but Sleuth has managed to eliminate the game board entirely. This is a good variation of the basic Clue type game.

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