tabletoppingboardgames 
A crime’s gone down in the city of Furrow Heights, and everyone’s got a story. The thing is, not all of them are true. In A Carnivore Did It! you play as detectives helping Chief Inspector Fox Banner figure out which animal suspects are lying and which ones aren’t.
Every case is basically a little logic puzzle. You’re not chasing clues or finding fingerprints; you’re just trying to make sense of a bunch of statements that don’t quite line up. It sounds simple, but when the peacock starts accusing the shark and the bear swears he’s innocent, it turns into a real brain workout.
It’s one of those games where you think, yeah, we’ve got this, and a couple of minutes later you’re all staring at the table in silence.
👥 1-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 10 minutes
📝 Designers: Daumilas Ardickas & Urtis Šulinskas
🎨 Artwork: Cecilia “Lonnie” Petrucci
🏢 Publisher: Horrible Guild (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each play focuses on one case from a dossier. You use a magnifying glass to pick which case you’ll solve and to reveal the information you need: which suspect and statement cards to use, how many liars and truth-tellers there are, and maybe even a time limit.
You put the suspect cards in a circle and line up their statements. Then the talking begins. Everyone reads, argues, and starts connecting dots until someone notices that one contradiction that changes everything. It’s logic all the way through, comparing heights, positions, and accusations around the table, and trying to make it all fit without breaking the rules in the dossier.
Once you think you’ve cracked it, you flip the dossier and check through the magnifying glass to see if you were right.
The game has two main ways to play. In open case mode, you can pick any case from any dossier and just go for it. It’s perfect for a short session or when you don’t want to commit to anything long. The time limits are optional here, but you can still use them for a quick performance check.
Campaign mode is where you go through eight cases in a row, each one a bit harder than the last. Time limits matter here since your final score depends on how quickly you solve each case. You get two badges to skip a failed case, but each one costs you a star at the end.
There are three levels of difficulty: normal covers dossiers 1 to 8, advanced runs from dossiers 5 to 12, and hard from 13 to 20. The hard level is where things start to get really tricky, with multiple culprits and more complex logic to handle.
There’s also a competitive variant where everyone works silently on the same case and races to be first to get the right answer.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
It’s a pretty small box, and it’s mostly cards and paper, but the production’s solid. Everything’s easy to read and handle, and the magnifying glass piece actually works well. It’s not a gimmick; it genuinely makes flipping through cases smoother.
The art is by Cecilia “Lonnie” Petrucci, and it gives the game some charm. The animals all look distinct. The shark looks sharp, the panther looks like it knows something, and the peacock, well, looks like a peacock. It’s colorful and fun without being overdesigned.
Each dossier has 100 cases, and there are 20 dossiers in total. That’s 2,000 puzzles, which is quite a lot of content. The layout is clean, and even when the table’s full of suspects and statements, everything stays readable.
Our Experience
When we opened A Carnivore Did It! for the first time, I liked how quick it was to set up. You’re reading cases within a couple of minutes. At first, the puzzles are short and forgiving. You can talk through them, make a few guesses, and still get it right. But once you reach the later dossiers, things tighten up fast. Suddenly there are two culprits, statements start contradicting each other in subtle ways, and you actually have to take notes.
I liked how the difficulty builds up. It feels fair, but it definitely gets heavy later on. The logic jumps make sense, but you need to stay focused. I wouldn’t play more than two or three of the more difficult cases in a row. It’s the kind of game that may slowly fry your brain if you push it too long.
With two or three players, it flows best. More than that, and it gets messy, with too many people talking at once. There’s also that common co-op issue where one confident player starts running the show. The rulebook suggests marking statements sideways to show false ones, which helps keep track of ideas, but it doesn’t completely solve the alpha detective problem.
We usually played in open case mode on shorter game nights. The campaign mode’s nice if you want structure, but it feels a bit strict for my taste. The competitive variant, on the other hand, surprised us. It turns the game into a silent logic sprint, which feels totally different and weirdly funny.
Our Thoughts
A Carnivore Did It! is, at its core, a pure logic game. It’s not a story-driven mystery or a dramatic whodunit. It’s about reasoning, deduction, and clean logical structure. That’s both its biggest strength and what might put some people off.
If you enjoy logic puzzles, you’ll appreciate how consistent and fair the system is. Every case has one correct answer. There’s no guessing, no debating what the designer meant. It’s just about finding what’s logically possible.
If you prefer games that tell a story or have characters with motives, you might find it a bit dry. The animals are fun to look at, but they don’t have personalities beyond their statements.
The game works well solo too. It officially plays one to five, but I’d say two or three is the sweet spot. It’s thinky but not slow once you get used to the format.
By the time you reach the harder dossiers, the logic starts to twist. You’ll be handling multiple culprits, conditional statements, and a web of connections that gets harder to untangle. It can get overwhelming, but that’s part of the fun if you like stretching your brain.
So yeah, I liked it. Not every session was thrilling, and sometimes it felt more like a math problem than a mystery, but it’s clever, tight, and different from most deduction games out there. Just don’t expect drama or a big narrative payoff; the excitement here is in spotting the one false statement that makes the rest of the logic fall into place.
And in the end, well, sometimes a carnivore really did do it.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Horrible Guild.
