The agonies of the agony column.

The Ciphers of The Times project at McGill University (headed by Nathalie Cooke) explores the Victorian agony column in the Times of London that often involved messages from criminals and detectives, including ways that messages in this column were encoded. The project includes an online interactive game where a person can play detective by following clues in a sample column. There also are discussion and data regarding "newspaper novels" (those that involve newspapers in their plots) such as The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester (aka James Redding Ware) and Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. An additional resource is the accompanying exhibition "News and Novel Sensations."

Students create a class murder-mystery game.

Students in the Texts and Gender, Detective Fiction course (ENG 3250), taught by Angela Gili at Hawai'i Pacific University, served as investigators in the fictional murder of Poppy Body, lead editor at Pandora Press. Faculty and staff members as well as administrators were suspects and witnesses. Drawing on various subgenres of mystery covered in class, students created game characters and developed clues. Read more here on the course and the game.

The game is afoot.

Mention of the Parker Brothers game Sherlock Holmes
in Life 3 Dec. 1904: 586

The Law & Humanities blog features the article by Ross E. Davies (George Mason University) "A Grand Game Introduction, or the Rise and Demise of 'Sherlock Holmes,'" which traces the short-lived history of the Parker Brothers game Sherlock Holmes.

Emulating Holmes.

Ad for The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

The blog of Harvard's Houghton Library features the board game "Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective," part of its Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.

French images of gaming through the ages.

The beautifully illustrated exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France "Jeux de princes, jeux de vilains" (Games of Princes, Games of Tricksters, if my imperfect French is correct) shows representations of gaming through history, including this far from pleasant image of Death from tarot cards and an image of the eighteenth-century Emmanuel-Jean de La Coste, a defrocked monk who counterfeited lottery tickets and was nabbed by the police.