Description

Black Sonata is a solo hidden movement and deduction game designed by John Kean and published by Side Room Games. In the game, your goal is to unmask Shakespeare's "Dark Lady," a mysterious woman who appears in several of his sonnets. In order to discover the Lady, you'll need to chase her around a map of Elizabethan London, trying to track her movements and maneuver yourself so that you and she share a location. If you think you've got her cornered, you can take a search action to see if you're right. If you are, congratulations! You get to draw a card that provides a clue to her identity. If you're not, you've wasted one of your precious search attempts—you only get ten in the entire game. The Dark Lady also becomes more difficult to track down as you discover more clues, because she can move more spaces away from you after each time you catch her. The Dark Lady's movements are managed by an ingenious deck ordering system that allows you to "move" her without actually seeing where on the map she has gone—only symbols that denote potential locations for her. This deck can be reordered in several different ways and even cut several times to vary the game up a bit.

To win Black Sonata, you have to do a bit more than just corner the Dark Lady enough times. You also have to piece together the clues to her identity that you collect during gameplay. The clue cards in Black Sonata are the cards of ladies who aren't the Dark Lady for this particular game. Each "Dark Lady" card has a set of symbols on it, some of which she shares with other potential Ladies. It's up to you to reason out the clues you've drawn and to determine which symbols must be on the real Dark Lady's card. The final time you catch her, you must declare the symbols that you believe you will match her identity. If you're right, you win! If you're wrong... time to reset the game and try again!

-- description taken from a review by Liz Davidson