Kickstarter Tabletop Alert: ‘Intent to Kill’

Can the detective puzzle out the serial killer’s motivation before it’s too late?

What Is Intent to Kill?

Intent to Kill is a murder mystery game for 2 to 4 players, ages 16 and up, and takes about an hour to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter as part of 25th Century Games’ 2025 Import Collection, which includes 11 different titles from around the world that you can mix and match. Intent to Kill is available for a $40 pledge. The game seems to be designed with 2 players in mind; you can play with more players by putting them on teams of 2 and they just make decisions together, but there is still only one murderer and one detective in the game.

The age rating is primarily for the subject matter—the game is about a serial killer, and although there aren’t any explicit illustrations of violence, there are references to different motives that have creepy illustrations of environments and tools belonging to the murderer, so parents should use discretion and check it out before playing with younger kids.

Intent to Kill was designed by Arthur Khodzhikov, with illustrations by OWL Agency. It was published by Hobby World, who provided my review copy, and is being imported by 25th Century Games.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.

Intent to Kill Components

Note: My review is based on the Hobby World edition from 2023; the Kickstarter edition will include an upgrade pack that replaces the cardboard standees and tokens with wooden tokens, and also includes player screens and 2 more scenarios.

Here’s what comes in the box:

• Game board
• 8 Building markers
• Detective marker
• 24 Evidence tokens
• Surveillance token
• 54 Civilian cards
• 5 Crime Scene cards
• 14 Detective cards
• 24 Motive cards
• 14 Murderer cards
• 9 Social Group tokens
• Notepad
• 2 Pencils
• 4 Memo cards

The game board is a large 4×4 grid showing a city map, with a name for each block (Business Center, Richmond, Old City, etc.). There’s room for some cards along one edge, and a turn order reminder at the bottom.

The civilian cards are long, narrow cards that are primarily a portrait of the civilian, with all of the game information at the bottom of the card: the occupation and social group, gender, age, and build, and height. The shape of the cards is a little odd and it can feel a bit like you’re shuffling a stack of bookmarks, but they’re designed to fit three to a square on the game board. The cards are double-sided with a color illustration on one side and a black-and-white version of the same portrait on the back. I like the style of these: they remind me of the covers of old pulp mystery novels, and it’s a pretty diverse group of people overall. The social groups do include things like “outcasts” and “criminals,” so the game still has some stereotypes, though.

Most of the other cards are standard-sized cards. As mentioned earlier, there’s no actual murder depicted, but there are references to it, like a hand holding a bloody cleaver. One thing in particular that seems like it might have gotten lost in translation is a motive card called “Killer.” The rest are things like “Vigilante,” “Robber,” “Cannibal,” and in the game they are the restrictions on which civilians the serial killer can target, so it feels strange that one of these is simply the word “Killer.” From the illustration and rule, my guess is that it may mean “Assassin.”

The notepad has a grid for taking notes about their line of questioning, to keep track of the answers the murderer gives them. The murderer also gets a sheet but primarily uses just the bottom strip of it to note down their own identity for reference, unless they also want to make notes about which questions they’ve been asked to try to keep their lies straight.

The buildings are cardboard standees, and are placed in the top corner of a block. There are two of each building, and they differ both in color and shape so they’re easily distinguished. I like the fact that the icons on them evoke the building type, but also serve as reminders of what the building actions are.

The memo cards are player aid cards, covering both modes (Logic and Intuition) and providing a reminder of the Detective’s actions.

How to Play Intent to Kill

You can download a copy of the rulebook here. There are two modes (and plenty of variants), but I’ll start with the Logic Mode, which is the recommended way to learn the game. I will also explain the rules as a 2-player game, but if you have teams of 2, they just share components.

The Goal

The detective needs to identify which civilian is the murderer and what their motive is. The murderer needs to evade capture long enough to kill five victims.

Setup

Each player gets a note sheet and a pencil. The four building markers are placed on the board according to the map setup (there are variant map setups at the back of the book) and the crime scene cards are placed on the right edge of the board in numerical order.

Shuffle the civilian cards and make a stack of 20 cards at random, returning the rest to the box. The murderer shuffles the civilians and draws one secretly—that is the murderer’s identity. The murderer draws a second card and writes them down as the person of interest (for a first game, you can omit the person of interest because it complicates things). The murderer records the identities and characteristics of their own identity and the person of interest on their sheet, and then shuffles the cards back into the deck.

The civilian cards are then laid out on the board: two in each of the corner blocks, and one each in all the remaining blocks. (The position of the cards within each square doesn’t matter.)

Choose 6 of the motive cards and give each player a set of the same ones. The murderer shuffles theirs and draws one, writing it down on their sheet—this is their motivation. Then they shuffle the cards back together, and both players can lay the motive cards out on the table for reference.

The murderer takes the social group tokens, shuffles them and draws 3 tokens secretly. They choose one to keep face-down and write it on their sheet and put the other two back in the game box. The one they keep are the supporters—this social group will lie to the detective. The remaining 6 tokens are placed in a face-down stack at the bottom corner of the board.

The detective gets the surveillance token, and places their marker (the car standee) in any block.

Gameplay

The game will last 5 or 6 rounds, and each round has three phases: Murderer, Detective, and City.

Murderer Phase

The murderer chooses two civilians to intimidate, turning them to the black-and-white side. These civilians will no longer talk to the detective. You may not intimidate a civilian who is currently in the detective’s block.

Then the murderer chooses a victim: they must fit the murderer’s motive card and cannot be in the same block as the detective, and they cannot be the murderer’s own identity. For instance, the Sadist cannot murder intimidated civilians, and the Spy can only kill victims that are in blocks with buildings. (Note that the murderer’s identity card doesn’t need to be in the same location as the victim—they’re very sneaky.) The murderer removes the victim’s card and places it on the right edge of the board, and places the corresponding crime scene card across the block where the victim was killed.

Once during the game, the murderer may choose not to murder anyone and just announces that they are done.

Detective Phase

The detective moves their marker to the new crime scene. If there are any civilians left in that block, the detective moves them to adjacent blocks—but civilians may not enter any crime scenes. If there is no legal space, then the detective can move them anywhere on the board (but only 3 civilians per block).

The detective takes two different actions from these options: question civilians, use police station, use diner, use hospital, or use fire station. While investigating, the detective can also spend up to 2 movement points to move orthogonally around the city.

The detective may question all of the civilians at their location as long as they are not intimidated. Each civilian is questioned independently and you ask a “yes” or “no” question about the murderer’s gender, age, build, or height. (The game narrows down the potential answers to 2 genders and 3 each of the other characteristics.) The murderer must answer honestly except if the civilian being questioned is the murderer’s own identity, the person of interest, or from the murderer’s supporter social group.

The four buildings each have their own unique actions that can be used if the detective is in the same block:

• Police station: put the surveillance token on a civilian in this block or an adjacent block.
• Diner: question one unintimidated civilian in this block or an adjacent block.
• Hospital: flip an intimidated civilian in this block or an adjacent block to their color side.
• Fire station: take a random token from the social group stack: you may move every citizen from this social group 1 space and then shuffle the token back into the stack.

The surveillance token allows the detective to do a bonus action at any time after it has been placed on a civilian (even on a future turn). Remove the token and then ask the murderer: “could you murder this person right now?” The murder must answer honestly. This helps the detective determine the motive.

City Phase

Any civilians in the same block as the detective are flipped back to their unintimidated side.

The murderer draws a random token from the social group stack and reveals it to the detective. The murderer now moves every civilian from this group one space (if possible). Then the detective does the same thing, drawing a different token from the stack and moving all those civilians. Then both tokens are shuffled back into the stack. If there are no cards matching a drawn token, that player may choose any group to move and that token is returned to the box instead.

Game End

At the end of the round, if the fifth murder has been committed, the game will end. The detective must name which civilian is the murderer and what their motive is; if they are correct, they win. Otherwise, the murderer wins.

(The detective may try to guess before the fifth murder, but it is much more difficult.)

Variant Rules

The intuition mode uses some more of the components, giving both the detective and the murderer additional abilities but also requiring a bit more leaps of intuition for the detective. The murderer gets a choice of two cards after each murder, while the detective must collect evidence tokens and get to the right location to get their action cards. The action cards are one-time-use cards that give the player some sort of advantage.

There are also some more variations for experienced players, as well as scenarios that start the board with a particular layout and indicate which motives cannot be used. These also have some new rules, and each comes with a brief story to provide a little more narrative background.

Why You Should Play Intent to Kill

I received a copy of Intent to Kill from Hobby World last spring and tried it out, but then found out that it wasn’t actually available for purchase in the US, so I wasn’t sure whether to write about it. I happened to see an announcement that 25th Century Games would be including it in their Import Collection campaign, so I figured this would be a great opportunity to share. I haven’t played any of the other games in the collection, so I’m just focusing on this one title.

Intent to Kill is a cat-and-mouse hunt, with one player trying to get away with murder(s), and the other trying to piece together the who and the why. It’s a logic puzzle, but with some twists. As I said at the beginning, the game is marketed for two to four players, but I think it really works best with two. I’ve played with three, where two people play as the detectives, but if you have two murderer players then the detectives can hear any of their discussions, which may give away more information.

The detective has two puzzles to solve and they’re mostly independent of each other, so let’s break it down a bit. The motive is actually the easier of the two, because the facts are more obvious there: there’s no lying about which civilian was killed or where it happened, so the detective’s job is to see what all of the victims have in common. Each game, there’s a set of possible motives that serve as restrictions for the murderer: the Maniac needs all victims to be the same gender, the Vigilante cannot murder victims near the detective, and so on. It’s up to the detective to connect the dots between the different crime scenes.

To hide the motive, the murderer needs to make each civilian fit as many possible motives at once. If you’re careful, you may be able to keep all of the possible motives in play for the first few cases, choosing victims that don’t break the rules for any of the motives. The detective has one other primary tool in this situation: the surveillance token. Using the police station lets you put a surveillance token on a civilian, and then you may ask the murderer whether that civilian could be murdered right now. If you think the murderer wants all the victims to be of different social groups, then choose a duplicate and do some surveillance—if the murderer says yes, then that helps you eliminate a motive.

What’s a little trickier is using the city phase to move civilians around. If you suspect the murderer won’t kill anyone in the center city blocks, then moving civilians into the center makes it harder for them to find a victim. If you think they need their victims to be alone in a block, then group people together. (Of course, the murderer also gets to move civilians during the city phase, to help position their potential victims in the right place.)

Then there’s the next puzzle: which of the civilians is the murderer? Unlike some other mystery games, the location doesn’t actually matter—this isn’t a hidden movement game, but a logic puzzle. Each of the civilians is a unique combination of gender, age, build, and height, so if you can determine all of the characteristics, you’ll know who it is. Also, since you only use 20 of the cards in each game, there are times when you may not need all four characteristics to pin down the identity. If there’s only one tall medium-build male on the board, then you don’t need to figure out what his age is.

But, of course, finding out the characteristics isn’t easy, because some of the civilians can lie to you. The murderer themselves and the person of interest, as well as anyone from the murderer’s supporter group. As the game progresses, the detective will see some of the social group tokens (during each city phase and by using the fire station), which eliminates some of the groups from suspicion—but of course the murderer and person of interest may be in different groups. Also, there are two of the tokens that were removed from the stack entirely, so even if you do manage to see all six tokens in the stack, you still only have a 33% chance of knowing which group is lying for sure. Trying to piece together who you can trust requires a lot of redundancy, asking multiple people from the same group, checking with other groups, and comparing answers.

Meanwhile, the murderer has to find ways to keep their identity hidden, and they have many tools to do so. Intimidating civilians prevents the detective from questioning them, so you can intimidate the honest ones, or maybe you can intimidate some of your own supporters (or yourself!) as a bluff. The detective always moves to the newest crime scene automatically, so you can try to set things up where your supporters will be nearby for questioning. And since the detective can question everyone in a single block for one action, the murderer generally wants to split people up to make it less efficient.

As the murderer player, I tried to choose a character to frame, and whenever I lied, I tried to lie consistently in a way that would point to that specific civilian. Of course, that mean choosing one early on who wasn’t going to be a victim. I’ve also made the mistake of being careless with my first few victims and then setting it up in a way that I had to target my own supporters, which meant I had fewer civilians who could lie about my characteristics.

There is definitely a bit of luck in the initial setup: for instance, if there just aren’t very many of the three social groups that the murderer draws at the beginning, then they may not have a good choice, which means it’s harder to hide their identity. Some of the motives seem a little easier to figure out than others, too. Overall, I would say the game does favor the murderer, though—with only 5 or 6 rounds, the detective can have a hard time pinning down the identity and may have to make a 50-50 (or worse) guess at the end.

If you like logic puzzles and the challenge of reading your opponent, and you aren’t turned off by the serial killer theme of the game, Intent to Kill may be right up your alley. The different modes and rules variants give you a lot to explore, but even just the base setup provides a good challenge each time. I haven’t yet gotten to try everything yet but even thinking back about it while writing this review made me want to get it back to the table again.

For more information or to make a pledge, check out the 25th Century Games 2025 Import Collection!

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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.