Batman: Everybody Lies is a big improvement on the Detective board game formula

polygon.com:

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Batman: Everybody Lies, the latest in the Detective series from Portal Games, and this clever little board game already has me intrigued. Players never take on the role of the caped crusader himself, but the experience feels every bit like crawling inside the panels of your favorite comic book and snooping around. Best of all, it rewards playing along with your friends — a feature that was not necessarily top of mind when designing the original game, which was much easier to finish solo.

Everybody Lies drops 2-4 players into the role of classic DC characters nominally aligned with the Batman — journalists Warren Spacey and Vicki Vale, detective Harvey Bullock, and Catwoman. Together they make up a special task force recruited by Jim Gordon with the purview to dig into contemporaneous cases that have the Gotham City Police Department stumped. Three such cases come bundled with the base game, for a total playtime of six to nine hours out of the box.

Mechanically, Everybody Lies is mediated by a simple unlock system that requires players to trade influence for fresh leads. It’s a welcome simplification of the original Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, which was — at least in my opinion — unnecessarily complex.Meanwhile, a similarly simple timer counts down to the end of the game with every player action. The result is a tense, but not frantic, pace that keeps everyone at the table engaged.

Part of that increased engagement is due to the game’s emphasis on comic book logic rather than realistic simulation. The original Detective openly displayed an egregious misunderstanding of American police work. While the cases and their associated clues were clever, the construct of the National