Base price: $30.
2 – 8 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 5
It’s Sunday! That means it’s time for me to be stressed and be behind on reviews. I was actually sick last week, which sucked, but I’m mostly fine now. This slowed down some of the gaming as well, but it is what it is. We’ve got Kickstarter games and Oink Games this week, which is always a good time. Oink is routinely a Gen Con staple for me, so I’m excited to get another game from them to the table. Let’s check it out!
In Dying Message, bad news: you’re dead! Mostly. There’s still a little bit of life left in you, so you’ve gotta make the ultimate choice: spite. You can still tattle on the person who killed you! Which, honestly, is fair. I think you’re well within your rights to spoil things for your literal murderer. Getting murdered is a big bummer. I assume. Unfortunately, you didn’t carry a pen, so you’re going to have to use the next best thing: your human blood! It’s not the easiest thing in the world, and you’re on a limited time frame, because you’re bleeding out, but you at least have plenty of blood! The other players will serve as detectives, trying to figure it all out. They can play cooperatively or competitively, however you’d like! There’s even a speed challenge where the first person who comes up with a message gets to die; what a treat! So gather all your blood and get ready to identify your murderer and then … well, die. What could be more fun?
Contents
Player Count Differences
A few, but largely in the competitive mode. With fewer players, you have this sort of diminishing returns situation: you score as the dead person for every player who gets it right, but they (the detectives) score for every player who gets it wrong. So your goal as the victim is to try and have every player (except one; you don’t score if everyone gets it right). With three total players, it just plays weird because you want exactly one person to get it right and one person to get it wrong. It’s a lot easier with more players, as a result. For lower player counts, I’d recommend the speed death showdown (or the cooperative mode): real-time trying to die is a lot more fun. No preference on player count for the cooperative mode, either: it’s just a lot of fun.
Strategy
- You can cover cards with other cards to make more complex messages. You can make connected messages of multiple blood cards. That’s fun! Use that to make fun shapes or interesting messages, but be careful! Your co-players can misinterpret that to their own peril (though in the competitive play mode, that might be what you want).
- Read all the culprit cards thoroughly! They have a lot of additional details that might be included and may be worth including aspects of that within your message.
- You can use your body as a signal also! You can’t explicitly point to culprits but you can cover up parts of your messages or hold cards or something to signal that some information might be more important than other information.
- Keep the culprit die covered. We had this happen once, hilariously, but there’s a cover for the culprit die you can use. If you don’t cover it, you spoil the surprise of the game. Even if you rotate the die, then players can make weird assumptions; did you flip it away, did you forget, or what?
- Discussing with the group can be useful, but not always! Like any sort of group consensus game, you run the risk of one person popping off and leading the rest of the players astray. There’s nothing you can do about it; you’re dead! But if you’re in the group, you do need to try to get your voice heard! Just make sure you’re actually right.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I currently want to give out my “game component of the year” award to the felt blood pool mat. It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever seen. It’s extremely stupid and yet, so cool.
- You get to scream when you die! You can really put your back into it if you want, or whatever; you get to die on your terms, just hopefully not in the way you pictured yourself dying.
- There are so many different culprits! There’s a lot of variety and you can get yourself killed over and over again.
- I like how varied the messages are as well. There’s a lot of options for how you can put things together. As you can tell from the pictures, one of the players managed to make a pretty convincing steaming pot! We just couldn’t tell at first because it was upside down.
- It’s a cute concept for a game. As cute as you can get for a game about murder, but it meets the bar.
- Plays pretty quickly. You can kind of keep playing rounds for as long as you want, or you can use the in-game points system!
Mehs
- Every time that Oink Games makes a new box size for their games I die a little inside. Part of what I loved was the consistency. Then Nine Tiles Panic and Moneybags happened. Then Tiger & Dragon Happened. Then the tiny expansion for Make the Difference Happened. Now I’m a broken man with a BESTA shelf from IKEA that doesn’t quite fit everything right. It’s very stressful.
- The sleeve around the game seems damage-prone. Game sleeves are one of the first things that gets truly messed up with a game in transit for long enough, which is a bummer. Would have preferred just keeping the normal telescoping game box.
Cons
- The competitive rules aren’t particularly compelling at low player counts. Like I said above, you’re really just watching two people talk and hoping that they disagree. If they agree, either way, you don’t get points. You only get points if they don’t agree, and then, at some level, they might as well vote the same just to spite you? It doesn’t really make for a compelling competitive experience until you get to higher player counts.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Dying Message is a hoot. Most of it, granted, is the performance art aspect of that, but I think Oink has had that entire concept on lock since Void, years ago, a game that is truly impossible to review in a useful way. Though maybe I’ll get around to it. I think that being able to try and create images from abstract scribbles on cards is a neat concept and I think it’s made even more compelling with the engagement of the dead player getting to scream and die and hold cards as a corpse in some way. It’s nice to give a “dead” player in a game something to do, and Dying Message certainly rolls out the red carpet for you, where the red carpet is a felt mat that’s meant to represent blood. There’s also a nice number of play modes, though again, competitive play doesn’t land that well for me at lower player counts. That’s okay; there’s plenty of other ways to play that I do enjoy. Great presentation, silly gameplay, and a lot of interesting table presentations. Everything you love about an Oink Games game! So that’s Dying Message for you; it’s a game that’s so much fun, I wish I were able to die!
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