On the Table – Perspectives Blue delivers another strong chapter

Back in 2023, I had the pleasure of playing a round of Perspectives with co-creator Matthew Dunstan. A crime-solving tabletop game that relies heavily on communicating with your peers around the table, it offered a unique spin on ‘playing detective’, where sharing information and being as detailed as possible is paramount when piecing together a case.

Now, Perspectives Blue offers another set of cases to solve; and thrillingly, they prove that the concept works very well beyond the initial offering, with the same intriguing storytelling and plot twists permeating throughout.

For the uninitiated, Perspectives forces communication, by giving each player a handful of illustrated cards, and then not allowing you to show them to one another. You can describe them however you like; each holds a certain amount of visual information, some of it relevant, and some of it not. It’s up to your crew of sleuths to figure out what is pertinent to the case, and what is just noise.

Perspectives Blue also plays with the idea of what a “case” is. While there are definitely some nefarious things going on that need to be solved, it’s not as cut-and-dry as a pile of evidence with fingerprints. The first case, called Roman Empire-Celt-Memory, has you waking up in the forest, not knowing who you are and how you got there, making you really think carefully about what’s gone on. The visuals are colourful, and almost like a series of mini-paintings, quite different from the other stories in the box.

Each case has four ‘folders’ to sift through, and depending on how well your group communicates and comes to decisions, it’ll take around 15-30 minutes to figure each one out. Then, as a final act, you’ll be asked some bigger questions about what happens next, utilising all of the cards and visuals from the previous folders.

To really get the most out of a case, you’ll want to do them all back-to-back, which does mean that they take a reasonable chunk of time. If you pause and come back another night, there will likely be story beats and visual clues you’ll forget, so making sure you have allocated an evening per case makes a lot of sense. We also found that four of us was the right amount of players, too; less than that, you’d have a lot more cards to explain, and more players would mean not enough info to really enjoy it.

When I spoke with Dunstan initially about Perspectives, he noted the importance of delivering “ah-hah!” moments, where you’ll gain a new insight into a card you’ve been looking at for a while, and things begin to fall into place. Perspectives Blue successfully offers that in spades; its incredibly satisfying when you uncover a vital piece of information, and while some of the prompting questions at the end of cases can come off a little vague, the end result of solving each mystery still managed to make us feel clever, while remaining challenged.

Perspectives Blue, then, is an easy recommendation; I think the cases here are stronger than the original, but I very much like the idea of coming back to this style of tabletop experience with new stories down the track. Hopefully, some more colours from designers Matthew Dunstan and Dave Neale are already in the works.

Perspectives Blue is available now in all good board game stores. Thanks to VR Distribution for providing a copy of Blue and Perspectives OG for this review.