by W. Eric Martin

For the most part, I'm spending my time at Gen Con 2025 looking at upcoming games, primarily for SPIEL Essen 25, but also for 2026.

Today, for example, among other publishers, with still more coming later in the day, I met with Horrible Guild. This Italian company doesn't have a specific style from one year to the next, so you never know what to expect.

One of its new releases for the second half of 2025 is A Carnivore Did It!, a co-operative game from Urtis Šulinskas (Planet, Hedgehog Roll) and first-timer Daumilas Ardickas. Here's what awaits:

In the example case above, you have five suspects, two culprits, and only one lie. Who committed the crime? (To clarify one of the statements, in a game with multiple culprits "A herbivore did it" means that at least one of the culprits is an herbivore.)

Horrible Guild lists a player count of 1-5, but you could have any number of players at the table...although you'd probably be talking over one another constantly, which wouldn't be helpful. Me, I'd probably solve cases on my own, with this being an ideal "airport tray" puzzle in which you don't need much space and can run through multiple challenges in however much time you have.

Kooky house numbers spottedwhile walking Indianapolis▪️ Two other titles coming in late 2025 from Horrible Guild both fall under the header My Murder Mystery, with one of the subtitles being The Final Protocol. Each title is for 5-7 players and will undoubtedly bring to mind How to Host a Murder titles from the 1980s.

Each player takes a character, and each character has story cards and objectives that you read silently to determine your background and what's important to you. As you might expect, one character is secretly the killer, and as you play you're trying to determine who that killer is.

Maybe. In fact, outing that person is not as important as you might think. All of you have secrets — aside from one of you being a murderer — and you don't want those secrets to be revealed. The game lasts five rounds, and in each round one player will be the leader, determining which of the eight locations you will visit. The leader will read information about that location out loud, while also learning secret information that they are not required to share — even though they will undoubtedly look suspicious if they say nothing!

Each player has two tokens that they can use during play either to veto a chosen location or to look at the secret information that only the round's leader has seen. Ideally the leader will have talked about this information beforehand to allow you a check their honesty. The game lasts only five rounds, while having eight locations, and you want to ensure that certain locations stay off limits so that your secrets won't be uncovered.

After five rounds, you vote on who the murderer is, and more importantly from a game perspective, you see how many of your objectives you have achieved. Anyone who scores at least three points wins, regardless of whether the murderer got away. You're all very selfish people, after all.

Each My Murder Mystery case will last 90-120 minutes and can be played only once — unless you have a terrible memory, of course, and wouldn't recall a murderer's face even if it were your own.

Does a murderer lurk among the hydrangeas?