Secret Tribe

Secret Tribe is a social deduction and murder-mystery game styled after the Chinese "jubensha" genre, designed for 5 to 6 players.

Created by Singapore-based Suspense Studio, the game is set in 2015 within the uncontacted Nozama Tribe deep in a tropical rainforest.

Overview

The story kicks off during a ritual honouring the tribe’s revered Monkey Spirit, when the tribal leader is found dead with mysterious claw-like marks on his back. Players take on characters to figure out whether the leader was killed by a supernatural curse or a human murder plot…

What is Jubensha?

Jubensha (often translated as “script murder”) is a hugely popular form of social deduction game in China. Players typically read detailed character booklets or “scripts”, discuss their alibis and secrets, examine evidence, and eventually vote on who they think committed the murder.

From what I’ve seen, jubensha mysteries tend to emphasise tricky cases requiring lateral thinking and careful analysis of numerous clues.

The characters

Secret Tribe has five detailed characters: Gatherer, Botanist, Shaman, Hunter, and Heir.

These are roles, rather than actual names. At first I thought that was to de-gender the characters, but since the characters are referred to as he and she throughout (and some illustrations are very gendered), I’m not sure why Secret Tribe didn’t use actual names.

Anyway, three of the characters are female, and two are male.
A sixth role is the journalist/detective, who doesn’t have a character booklet (since they have no part in the murder) but draws evidence cards and tries to solve the mystery with everyone else.

One person facilitates the game. Anyone can be the facilitator, or the journalist/detective does it if they are playing. (We had five players – our Heir facilitated the game for us.)

I played Botanist.

How it works

Secret Tribe is a little like a traditional dinner party murder game (like the boxed How to Host a Murder sets), in that each character (except the journalist/detective) has a booklet to read.
Unlike a dinner party murder, the booklets are fairly detailed (they take 10-20 minutes to read and absorb), and the murderer knows that they are the murderer.

Secret Tribe is very much a sit-around-the-table experience rather than a mingle-and-interact game. While the game is played in rounds like a dinner-party murder game, there didn’t seem to be any expectation that food would be served between rounds.

Although everyone has a character and secrets to protect, this isn’t really freeform roleplaying. We spent most of our time discussing evidence, defending ourselves, and trying to reconstruct what happened.

Playing Secret Tribe

Once everyone has absorbed their character, play starts with everyone revealing their alibis.

Then, once that discussion finished, we drew clue cards from separate piles on the table (representing each villager’s hut). These cards revealed facts about what’s going on, which led to more discussion (and accusations).

Once those discussions were over, we drew from a second stack of clue cards. These were even more incriminating – and led to more accusations.

Once the accusations (which got quite noisy in our game) were over, guided questions led to even more accusations (!), and then we voted by pointing at who we thought the murderer was. Sadly, our murderer got away with it…

The game then finished off with the facilitator reading a denouement, explaining how the murder was carried out.

Things I liked

The game was a lot of fun. We played for about 2.5 hours and had a good time. I imagine it might be slightly longer with a sixth player. Everyone had secrets and motives for murder, and no one person or character dominated the game.

As the murderer can’t hide clues, there’s no smoking gun pointing at the murderer – you need lateral thinking and piecing evidence together to identify the culprit. That’s smart design, since it would be much too easy to create clues that reveal the murderer too quickly.

Things that were a bit off

It wasn’t perfect, though. The setting (a secret tribe that has never been contacted by the modern world) didn’t hold up under close scrutiny. If you want a realistic jubensha, look elsewhere.

One element of the murderer’s alibi also felt rather familiar to our most experienced jubensha player: they had encountered the same device in three of the five jubensha they’d previously played. I won’t say what it was, for obvious reasons.

Overall

We had a lot of fun with Secret Tribe, and I’d happily play another jubensha. The setting didn’t entirely convince me, but the deduction worked well and kept all five of us involved for 2.5 hours.

I’m Steve Hatherley, an experienced designer of interactive murder mystery games, creating and hosting them since the 1990s. I co-founded Freeform Games and Great Murder Mystery Games to bring this distinctive, character-driven style of game to a wider audience. My work—including Death on the Gambia, Hollywood Lies, and
—has been enjoyed by thousands of players worldwide. I’ve also written a book sharing my approach to creating immersive, freeform mystery experiences.