Portal Games has announced a new partnership with Warner Bros., DC, and Genuine Entertainment to create a new line of board games featuring Batman. The first game as part of the new partnership from Portal Games is Batman: Everybody Lies. The game uses the award-wining Detective game series made by Portal Games for a cooperative deduction game featuring Batman. The games are for two to four players and challenge you to think like Batman. The first game will feature Vicki Vale, Harvey Bullock, Catwoman, and more. Full details are not known at this time as the initial announcement gives few details. The game will be available for preorder for $50 on March 4, 2022. The game will be expected to ship this spring. We will share more details once they are made available.
Portal Games Batman: Everybody Lies
The first game, Batman: Everybody Lies, will feature an original narrative in a crime-solving deduction game where players need to gather evidence and connect the facts to unravel the mystery. Fully anchored in rich comics lore, Batman: Everybody Lies challenges players to take on the roles of four key investigators – instinctive journalist Warren Spacey, tenacious reporter Vicki Vale, brutish detective Harvey Bullock, or the cunning Catwoman – who are drawn into a series of mysterious events unfolding in Gotham City for their own respective agendas, ultimately becoming unlikely allies entrusted to help thwart villains new and old as only the World’s Greatest Detective can!
Throughout the game, players must solve a series of challenging cases with a finite amount of time and resources. Players cooperatively make decisions on how to forward the investigation, as they decide to visit famous locations in Gotham City (like the Batcave, Arkham Asylum, Blackgate Penitentiary, and the Gotham City Gazette) and cross paths with well-known Batman characters (like Batman, The Penguin, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Scarecrow, and more) as they chase leads, identify suspects, and gather enough information to help save Gotham City. Yet even when these unlikely allies combine forces, their goals are not always aligned. So to capture the complexity of the comics, Portal has added a new hidden agenda mechanic to the Detective system, which assigns secret goals and unique win conditions for each player based upon which DC character they portray.
During gameplay, players will utilize a variety of physical and digital game components to solve the puzzle and steer the game narrative in fun, surprising directions – a deck of cards with essential clues and plot twists, various physical handouts, and a dedicated website with access to in-world resources from the Gotham City Gazette archives – for a truly immersive experience. The game also features another new thematic treat – Scenes – that bring memorable gameplay moments to life via original comic book illustrations that feel torn straight from the pages and panels of the beloved comics.
Beginning with an introductory Prologue designed to get players acquainted with the game rules, Batman: Everybody Lies then continues with three big cases to solve, each taking roughly 2-3 hours to play. Each case can be played separately as stand-alone episodes, yet should players crack all four cases, they will unravel a master narrative with an epic climax. Every scenario ends with a final report with questions verifying how well the team has investigated the case. This game format proved a commercial and critical success for Portal Games’ award-winning Detective game series, spawning a growing library of original and licensed titles selling hundreds of thousands of units worldwide in over a dozen languages since 2018.
