Review: MURDERS AT KARLOV MANOR: THE CASE OF THE THREE BLADE KNIFE Needs Some Refinement

Beadle & Grimm’s has released Murders at Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Blade Knife. This is described as a murder mystery game set in the Magic: The Gathering plane of Ravnica. That said, you really don’t need to know anything about Magic to enjoy this product. The Case of the Three Blade Knife supports a minimum of 1 player and requires a smartphone with the Pinfinity AR app. Beadle & Grimm’s was kind enough to provide me with a copy to review, but all thoughts below are my own. If you want to enjoy it, you can purchase it for $49.99 from Beadle & Grimm’s store.

Gather around the table with friends for a game night you’ll never forget! Work together to connect the evidence and unlock the secrets of The Case of the Three Blade Knife murder mystery game.

Anyone who is a fan of murder mystery games will love The Case of the Three Blade Knife. Players familiar with the Magic: The Gathering world of Ravnica will relish the immersive story elements - but no previous knowledge of Magic: The Gathering is needed to play the game!

Pore through Lead Inspector Tam Sennic’s evidence and use the augmented reality embedded in your Ravnican Agency of Magicological Investigations (RAMI) badge (3" x 3" by Pinfinity) to identify suspects and bring a killer to justice!

I am extremely ambivalent towards The Case of the Three Blade Knife. There are things that I loved like the use of augmented reality, but I also did not enjoy certain aspects. I played it with my wife and the first thing to note is that this experience is really a one-time thing. Depending on how you care for items included you can maybe give it to friends or something, but it does seem to be just a one night experience. This isn’t inherently bad, but it is important to know going in. Let’s talk about some of my hang ups and then we’ll end more positively.

I want to start with my nitpicks. First, I don’t think that I’d call The Case of the Three Blade Knife a game. For me personally, it’s an experience, but it doesn’t have enough to make it a game. There are no timers, no opposing force, nothing to put any kind of pressure on and nothing to ‘win’. Essentially, the first part of the game has the players reading through and looking at tons of documents which have all the clues to get a suspect. Then, you select your suspect using the AR pin and that starts the second part of the experience which gives you more documents to pore over and complete the narrative. That’s right, the vast majority of your time in this experience is you reading. If that doesn’t sound fun for you, this is not something you will enjoy.

Another nitpick I have is that it’s called Murders at Karlov Manor and yet none of the murders occur at Karlov Manor! I know that it’s the name of the Magic set, but surely it could’ve been the scene for at least one of the murders. My third nitpick is that I feel that the AR pin is underutilized. You use it to select the suspect, get the solution, get hints, and then about 3-4 items interact with the audio translator and decoder and I was hoping for a bit more from that last point.

Now let’s get to my number one complaint. In my opinion, The Case of the Three Blade Knife is best as a single person experience. Because there are so many papers to sift through, you naturally want to divide the work, but then each person is missing bits that make certain aspects stand out and so as you discuss what you went through it’s extremely easy for important information to be overlooked because somethings are only important if you have information from each grouping of papers. This means that everyone is probably going to be reading everything (or at least most of the papers). So then, what’s the point of having more than one person?

Another complaint I have is that Stage 2 felt extremely short and extremely easy. The first phase took us probably 45-60 minutes to complete because of all the papers you have to sift through and it was a little trickier to figure out the suspect (still not hard if you’ve gone over all the documents), but then the second phase took us maybe 10-15 minutes to piece together. Honestly, the story isn’t bad, but for the amount of work we had to put in reading through everything it did feel a little lackluster. By the time we hit ‘Solution’ in the AR app, I had figured out about 95% of the story. I wish that there had been a bit more in the details that I could’ve missed and been surprised by. Those are my favorite mysteries when I can figure out about 75-80% of the puzzle but there are a few details that I can’t quite piece together but they don’t stop me from solving the mystery as a whole. Because I had so much of the story, pushing ‘Solution’ just felt ceremonial.

Now let’s talk about the positives of The Case of the Three Blade Knife. The materials in this experience are so well crafted. Beadle & Grimm’s has a reputation for providing high quality materials and this is no exception. There are papers with edges that look torn, there’s an invitation that they actually wrinkled to match the description, the art is great on the posters and map, etc. Honestly, it’s because of the attention to detail and quality of the contents that I do think that the game is not overly priced. At most, I would argue that it should be closer to $40, but I feel like it would be a very nitpicky argument not worth having.

Another positive is the ‘Hints’ button in the AR app. It actually did well at providing hints to direct you to solutions without flat out giving it to you. We used it just to confirm that we were looking at the correct details just before selecting our suspect.

At the end of the day, The Case of the Three Blade Knife was a good idea with extremely well-made contents but it didn’t land great with me and my wife. I wish that there had been a bit more to drag me into the final story and make me go, ‘Ohhhh!’ I wish that some of the tools in the app had been integrated more into the clue finding. I do wonder if there is a better way to experience this with more than one person that’s not just everyone sitting around reading, discussing a little, reading the papers that they didn’t start with because there are details that are not being brought up because they are only important when the other people mention their seemingly unimportant details, discussing for about five more minutes, and then have the suspect figured out. I would like to see Beadle & Grimm’s refine this idea and come out with something that better fits me and my love of murder mysteries.