Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
The hardboiled detective in the Thirties. Players work as operatives for the Continental Detective Agency entering the exciting, exotic and dangerous underworld of 1934 San Francisco.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Paper-and-Pencil
Record choices and results directly on a personal sheet.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Solo / Solitaire Game
Provide rules and objectives designed for a single player.
Storytelling
Create or extend a narrative in response to prompts or game events.
Read the full game description
The hardboiled detective in the Thirties. Players work as operatives for the Continental Detective Agency entering the exciting, exotic and dangerous underworld of 1934 San Francisco. From Chinatown to Nob Hill, from gambling dens to drawing rooms, from forgery to murder, Gumshoe splendidly captures the rough and tumble world of ‘the hard-boiled detective’. There is one case to solve each day over a period of nine days from July 3rd to July 11th 1934. The ‘Old Man of the Continental Detective Agency’ gives out assignments. Everything players need to dig out the clues, search out the suspects and figure out the solutions is here: detailed 1930s maps of San Francisco and the Bay Area, directories alphabetically listing thousands of people and places encountered in investigations, a case book with hundreds of clues to unravel, police mug shots with vital statistics on dozens of known criminals, dated newspapers, a fingerprint file, time sheets for recording the time spent on each clue, and case reports with the solutions to the cases. Gumshoe is not a role-playing game or a board game. It is a detective investigation game for the individual or team who work to solve a large number of cases. Game is from the makers of the innovative and award-winning Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. Gumshoe introduces several new gaming concepts, it continues the traditions of simple rules, elaborate and well-constructed plots, excellent writing and faithfulness to its period style, which made the Consulting Detective series so popular worldwide.