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.
Yeah…we’re back on track.
After a so-so run with Masters of Crime: Incognito—the fourth game in the KOSMOS one-shot mystery game series—I waited a few months before attacking the fifth game, Masters of Crime: Mosquito. My wife and I carved out a Friday night, grabbed a laptop, and sent the kids off to bed early. Would Masters of Crime continue a downward trend with Mosquito, or would the road to recovery be lined with gold?
I’m happy to report—so, so happy to report—that Masters of Crime: Mosquito sits comfortably alongside the other three exceptional MoC titles, Vendetta, Rapture, and Shadows. And, like Shadows, Mosquito has an ace up its sleeve, by serving as both a murder mystery AND an adventure game by extending into two solid halves that features plenty of puzzles in a wide range of difficulties alongside a story that riffs on many great films of the last 30-40 years.
KOSMOS now sells all five of these titles as a five-pack. While Incognito is a bump in the road, it’s still worth buying all five of these titles at once if you are new to the series. Masters of Crime is the best one-shot cooperative mystery series on the market.
I’ll share a few thoughts below in this spoiler-free review.
Treasure Trove
In Masters of Crime: Mosquito, players take on the role of a treasure hunter, a person of very questionable standards who is willing to do whatever it takes to track down the world’s most vaunted treasures. When the game opens, we are heading to a secret night meeting in downtown London with our reliable black market trader, an archeologist who works at a local university. The meeting is set to help the players locate a treasure that is supposedly hidden somewhere in Latin America.
Naturally, this meeting doesn’t go as planned…and it ends with a dagger in the back of our archeologist friend. The dagger comes courtesy of Mosquito, a dangerous criminal organization. The mystery unravels from there, so the game begins with a search for the killer. Which of the suspects is working for Mosquito?
As is the norm for games in the Masters of Crime series, there’s a wide mix of sources from which to pull information, be it Google searches, fake websites built solely for the game, voice mails, newspaper articles, visual clues, and a whole lot of puzzles included inside nearly a dozen envelopes. It’s this range of activities that works so well, and it’s also why I think playing this with two or three players is just more interesting than going after the investigation solo (that is, once again, an option, but I continue to find that two players is the sweet spot).
After going through all the clue cards and coming up with a decision on who murdered the archeologist, the game becomes a somewhat different game in its back half, because players still need to track down the treasure, using a large map with different locations that are only discovered through the game’s website. The first half of the game was a banger, but I was initially concerned about the change of pace for the second half. But just a few minutes in, I was very happy to follow the path Masters of Crime: Mosquito laid out, with an additional (and somewhat shorter) jungle adventure awaiting the players, including a fun series of physical activities along with more puzzles.
Let’s start with the puzzles. After my recent play of Winnie the Pooh: Serious Detective, it really struck me how much I love puzzles that come in a range of difficulty levels. Most investigation games get this wrong, but not Masters of Crime: Mosquito. None of the puzzles were super easy, although at least one of them was surprisingly quick. And at the other end of the spectrum, none of the puzzles was impossible, or had a logic gap that made solving the puzzle ridiculous.
The puzzles in Mosquito were challenging, some more so than others, but all of them eventually made sense. That’s what I look for in a mystery game. No hard stop/roadblock puzzles, which discourage players from bothering to care. Mosquito had some tough ones, including one that forced us to the KOSMOS website to pull up a hint or two. But nothing game-breaking.
The dialogue, the suspects, the situations, and deducing who the murderer was all on point as well. The star scoring system returns in Mosquito, mixed with a time element that surfaced in one of the other games, so racing to the game’s ending was measured against trying to get a top-level score. And for the first time in my five Masters of Crime plays, we got the top-level finale rating, from a range of maybe five scoring tiers shown on the game’s final card.
It was all very satisfying, and rewarded players for following the bread crumbs in ways that made sense.
Buy It
Masters of Crime: Mosquito, like three of the other four games in the series, was exceptional. The mix of themes, from titles like Raiders of the Lost Ark to National Treasure to nearly anything featuring archeologists, action adventure plots, and treasure maps, worked well and the playtime landed once again in the 3-4 hour range, with a break that spread the adventure across two days of a recent weekend.
And while these games are normally a fit for adults only, we found Masters of Crime: Mosquito to be a fit for almost anyone who watches PG-13 movies. While I think four people would have been a crowd, I think Mosquito could have worked for my kids (ages 12 and 9), and it is certainly a family-weight mystery game, and is never explicit in the way that some of the previous games in this series were.
That should open up the game to a wider variety of players. If you’re in need of a full evening of fun for about $20, Masters of Crime: Mosquito is absolutely worth a look!
