Alibi

Alibi starts from a dead person in a house full of people and forbids you from accusing anyone. Six suspects, six weapons, six empty rooms: your job is to put each person and each object where the statements force them to be. Once everything is in place, the room that contains the murderer and the weapon identifies itself. An accusation is not a decision; it’s what remains.

1. Read the clues. They are drawn rather than written: an arrow between two tiles, an X, a downward arrow. Tap one to get its sentence in plain text.
2. Drag a suspect or weapon tile into one of the six rooms to test a hypothesis. The game itself says: as long as it isn’t validated, it costs nothing.
3. Tap a placed tile to lock it. The LOCKED counter climbs toward 12, and a wrong call leaves a mark.
4. Two buttons close off the board: HINT and SHARE SCENARIO.

Because the whole genre asks you to name a culprit and Alibi refuses the question. You’re not looking for a murderer, you’re arranging an evening: where each person stood, where each object lay. The culprit falls into place at the end like a residue, and this inversion completely changes the feeling: you don’t play to be right against someone, you play to make an entire scene hold together. Add pictogram clues you have to learn to read, a week that hardens from Monday to Sunday, and a board where you can try everything for free before committing: it’s deduction without the fear of being wrong.

Alibi colors nothing and shows no score. The only feedback is the lock: a validated tile stays in place, a wrong call leaves a mark, and the LOCKED 0/12 counter shows how many placements are secured out of the twelve to find, six rooms each requiring both a person and an object. The rest of the time the board is silent, because moving a tile without validating it commits you to nothing. It’s a game where the interface’s silence is the rule, not a shortcoming.

The week, easy Monday to hard Sunday

Seven numbered dots sit above the board, from MON EASY to SUN HARD. A Tuesday shows two difficulty points filled out of seven.

Pack

A Pack entry sits in the top bar, next to Games which opens the publisher’s other games.

• Clues are rebuses before they are sentences. Take the time to tap each to read its text before placing anything: an arrow between two tiles and an X don’t state the same constraint.
• Nothing forces you to validate immediately. Drag-and-drop leaves no mark, so build a whole hypothesis provisionally and only lock what it has made certain.
• The counter goes to 12 for six rooms: each room requires a person AND an object. A half-filled room is never a final state, and reasoning in pairs rather than by tiles saves a turn.
• The game advises starting with the tightest spot: the person or object that the clues leave least freedom for. A forced placement triggers two or three others without having to reread anything.