Two thousand crimes in a few cards, and one was wrong

Daumilas Ardickas was barely a teenager when he stood on the podium of the International Olympiad in Informatics: silver in 2005, bronze the following year. Then a PhD in mathematics at Vilnius University. It's not the resume you'd expect behind a talking animal game.

His co-author, Urtis Šulinskas, comes from the opposite side of the brain. Also Lithuanian, he spent years working as an animator at children's summer camps, and in 2020 he won the Kinderspiel des Jahres — the most important award in the world for family games — with Speedy Roll, a game in which you roll a plastic hedgehog. Warm, immediate, accessible to everyone.

A Carnivore Did It! is the exact point where these two brains meet, and it could not exist without either of them. It needs Urtis's instinct — anthropomorphic animals designed by Italian Cecilia "Lonnie" Petrucci, who has worked on animated films like Klaus and Space Jam, ten minutes per game, even a child can sit down and play. And it needs Daumilas's engine: to generate two thousand logic puzzles and ensure that each has only one solution. Published by the Milanese Horrible Guild.

I import it in the English edition, because the text on the cards is minimal and repetitive — "the shark tells the truth", "a carnivore is the culprit" — and with two words of glossary, anyone can play it. But the thing that made me want to tell its story isn't written on the back of the box.

You open the box expecting two thousand case cards. They're not there. The trick is that a case is not an object printed anywhere: it's a matching recipe.

Each Dossier sheet — twenty in total, one hundred cases each — sets the rules of the game: how many suspects on the table, how many culprits to find, how many are lying. The single case, on one line, only tells you one thing: which statement card to give to which suspect. That's all. The cards are the alphabet, the Dossier is the index of words.

What you experience while playing is a strange sensation: you draw from a well that seems infinite, knowing full well that the well is in an eighteen-centimeter box. And there's the flip side, which reviewers honestly point out: just one incorrect match during preparation and the entire case stops working, becoming unsolvable without you understanding why.

At high levels — seven suspects, conditional statements, even uncertainty about how many are telling the truth — clean deduction gives way to trial-and-error. More than one reviewer admits that at some point, they start guessing systematically. It's less elegant. But it's also the moment when the game shows what it truly is.

They call it a detective game, but there's nothing to investigate. No motive, no weapon, no witnesses, no story. There's only one question: are the statements consistent with each other, yes or no? It's a logic check with the face of a mystery novel.

The reviewers themselves betray this. When they try to describe it, no one says "it looks like a detective novel." They say it looks like sudoku. They say it looks more like a math problem than a mystery. And in fact, you don't discover the culprit: you verify it.

Culture

The human verifier A Carnivore Did It doesn't ask you to imagine a crime: it asks you to act as a processor. You're the one checking, line by line, whether the machine that generated the case produced something coherent. It's a pleasure very much of our era — not to create the content, but to validate it. Turing Machine, its more famous cousin, made that verifier physical: its cards mechanically guarantee that a solution exists. Here, however, the two thousand cases are pre-baked and archived. And that's precisely why some came out wrong from the factory. Daumilas Ardickas — IOI silver 2005, IOI bronze 2006. Case 17-07 reported: BoardGameGeek, Nov. 2025.

The best proof that the mask is thin came from the players. In November, on BoardGameGeek, someone reported that case 17-07 didn't add up: with those constraints, the Panther's statement always turned out to be true, and the case didn't have a unique solution. Horrible Guild published a list of levels to replace. Case 17-07 is the first on the list.

In a true mystery, you can't have a broken crime: the truth is hidden well or poorly, but it's there. Not here. When the machine made a mistake, no unsolved mystery remained under the mask. A bug remained. And what it says about us is that we still had fun — in fact, we enjoyed fixing it.