Outfoxed!: The Best Whodunit Board Game for Little Detectives
Our Game of the Month here on Dad Suggests is sometimes a brand new game we’ve just discovered and we’re really excited about, but every once in a while I like to revisit our all-time favorites too. This is especially the case because our 5-year-old daughter is growing up and discovering some of her brother’s favorite board games of the past. And that’s the case with this month’s Game of the Month - the spectacular Outfoxed!.
Outfoxed! is a game from Gamewright for ages 5 and up, and we’ve actually talked about it on Dad Suggests quite a lot, without ever having highlighted it in its own featured article. It’s long been one of our son’s favorite games, so we’ve added it to articles like our favorite cooperative games for 5-year-olds, and our list of games that help teach logic. But it also sits in 1st place on our list of the very best board games for 5-year-olds period. That’s pretty high praise!
Of course the fact that our kids love it so much is a big part of the appeal. But, believe me, it has to be a lot more than that for a game to climb to the top of our lists. Mom and Dad have to be big fans of the game too, and I personally really enjoy playing Outfoxed!. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable game of logic and deduction, and it’s a real pleasure to share the experience with little ones.
And it also happens to be our favorite kind of board game experience with little ones - a cooperative experience! We’ve always enjoyed working together on family game night, and Outfoxed! has long been one of our very favorites. For the uninitiated, cooperative games feature common goals, and everyone is typically free to openly discuss strategies and plans, because the players will all lose or win as a team.
And cooperative games really stand out and show their value when it’s a logic and deductive reasoning game. When you’re playing with your toddlers, it’s incredibly helpful to have open discussions about the logic taking place, and it’s a fantastic learning opportunity working this out while everyone is working together.
How to Play Outfoxed!
A fox has stolen a pot pie, and it’s up to you and your fellow detectives, who are apparently all chickens, to solve the case. We don’t know which fox it was the stole the pot pie, but there are clues scattered all around the game board. There are also lots of potential suspects, and it’s up to you to weed out the innocent foxes from the one pot-pie-thieving culprit.
On your turn, you have to choose whether you want to look for clues, or reveal more suspects. There are 3 dice, and basically you have to get all 3 dice to land on clues or suspects - using the Yahtzee rules of rerolling 3 times. If you’re looking for clues, you move your piece towards the nearest clue on the game board. If you reveal suspects, you get to turn over 2 more suspect cards and decide if you can rule them out or if they’re still a suspect.
The problem is that the thief is trying to escape during the entire game. If you fail in your attempts to roll the dice too many times, he or she will sneak down the manhole and everybody loses. I think the difficulty is perfectly balanced for a 5-year-old game like this. We don’t lose too often, but it’s definitely possible and appropriately exciting - and it’s quite easy to move the culprit more spaces each turn to increase the difficulty.
Using the Clue Decoder
Kids sometimes fall madly in love with the simplest and most unexpected things, and that’s absolutely the case with the clue decoder in Outfoxed!. Every time you land on a clue, you place it in the clue decoder to see if the thief is wearing that item. And you’ve already randomly chosen a culprit from a deck of cards and slid it into the decoder at the beginning of the game. On that card is a random assortment of green dots, and that’s what makes the decoder work.
For example, you might land on a clue with a necklace on it. You then place it on the clue decoder and slide it open. If you see a green dot, it means that the thief was indeed wearing a necklace. If you don’t see green, then you can safely rule out any of the suspects wearing a necklace.
I can’t stress enough how much both of my kids love this thing, and I’ve heard the same from many other parents. It just turned into one of those things that absolutely captivates them and captures their imagination. It was once one of the special objects that my son wanted to carry around in his pocket and sleep with at night, something he still does to this day with treasured items.
Sometimes gimmicks in board games are a headache and hard to set up, and oftentimes they don’t add anything of substance to the game. But that’s not the case here. The design of this game is elegant and it flows wonderfully. The clue decoder works well and it’s efficient - on top of the fact that it captures the hearts of kids.
Logic and Deduction in Outfoxed!
And the clue decoder is also the source of some fantastic gameschooling. Logic is one of my very favorite things to teach kids while playing board games. I vividly remember how games like Clue and Mastermind introduced me to the dizzying concepts of logic and reasoning, and I treasure opportunities like that with my own kids. And Outfoxed! is simply one of the best games out there to start these concepts with little ones.
The very first time playing this game with my 5-year-old daughter, it was adorable to see her place the clue with the cape on it into the decoder and discover that the thief was not wearing a cape. She began to ponder what this meant. Her mother and I gently prodded, “so if the thief wasn’t wearing a cape, what does that mean for these suspects?” A light bulb went off, and she picked up a suspect who was wearing a cape and held the fox high into the air triumphantly while crying aloud “innocent!”.
Outfoxed! for Family Game Night
It’s also very nice that Outfoxed! is the kind of game that you don’t grow out of very quickly. We started playing this game before our son was 5, and he still hasn’t grown out of it at 8 years old. Not only are you able to adjust the difficulty like I mentioned before, but the base game itself simply hasn’t lost its appeal at all.
Right now, for our 5-year-old, a big part of the game is still the challenge of the logic and deductive reasoning - focusing hard to keep straight whether you can eliminate suspects or not. But, for our 8-year-old, the idea of eliminating suspects is second nature by now, having mastered the logic required by the game. But he still loves to do it - partly because of the charm of the clue decoder itself, but also because it’s simply a well-designed and enjoyable game.
I also think it’s adorable how both of our kids constantly and consistently choose to search for clues on their turn, even if strategy should clearly dictate that we need more suspects to be revealed. Chalk that one up to the obsession with using the clue decoder I suppose. Mom and Dad have long ago resigned themselves to the fate of being the suspect revealers for this team of detectives. And now that our daughter is the perfect age for this game, I don’t see these detectives retiring anytime soon.
You can find Outfoxed! at your friendly local game store or online at Amazon. Have you ever played Outfoxed! before? What’s your favorite logic game for kids? Let us know in the comments!
