Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
A Carnivore Did It! (2025, Horrible Guild) is a game so simple to review that I’m going to do my best to keep this to two minutes in length, based on the reading time estimate you see above. (In part, that’s because the game is a cooperative deduction game that, at its basic level, only gives players two minutes to solve that round’s crime.)
Working alongside fictional detective Fox Banner, players must deduce which of the 3-7 suspects are guilty of a crime that was recently committed in Furrow Heights. Using nothing but simple statement cards attached to each suspect, a dossier sheet detailing that round’s rules, and a magnifying glass, players must figure out which suspect is lying, which ones are telling the truth, and ultimately which one is guilty of each unnamed crime.
The suspects are animals—Panther, Shark, Bear, Iguana. There are seven suspects in the box. The easier cases only feature three suspects and one criminal…and the hard ones feature seven suspects, and as many as three guilty parties. There are two THOUSAND different cases on the dossiers. There are three play formats: co-op open cases, which are single cases to tackle in just a few minutes. You can play competitively, which is a race to see who can correctly guess the suspect(s) first. And there’s a campaign mode, forcing players to knock out eight open cases in a row using time limits and a three-strike “badge” system. Plus, the campaign mode comes with three different levels to shake things up even more.
I did a couple of rounds of A Carnivore Did It! with Horrible Guild at Gen Con earlier this year. Then I got it home, and to prep for a night with my review crew, I played three rounds by myself to make sure I had the rules down. Then a fourth to, you know, make sure I had the rules down.
After my fifth open case—again, just to make sure I had the rules down, hehehe—I showed A Carnivore Did It! to my nine-year-old. After just one play, he wanted to run it back. We moved up a couple dossier levels. We beat that, and he wanted to go again.
My 11-year-old came downstairs for dinner, and saw us playing. “Can I play?” they said.
“Sure,” I said. The nine-year-old shared the rules. Then the three of us played ten more cases, getting eight of them right.
My wife, standing nearby, couldn’t believe how much fun the rest of us were having. She was the one making dinner that night, so I feel bad never inviting her over to join us. But the game has been living in my kitchen ever since that first set of plays, and we haven’t looked back.
Buy It, Now
A Carnivore Did It! is great. It is fun, it is interesting, it is easy to teach, and it is hard to master. With 2,000 cases, there are levels for all types of players. It has a great title. It has great art. It’s a game you can play for 60 seconds, or 60 minutes, or for days on end, if you want to set up multiple campaigns.
A Carnivore Did It! is a no-brainer. Get yourself a copy if you like a good deduction game!
