Deduction board game are drawn at random. Notable members of this category include "Black Box" and "Master Mind". Investigation games are board games in which the players generally play as police, detectives or other investigators. The best known game of this type is "Cluedo". In fact, many of games in this category utilize a mechanic known as "The Missing Card," which was developed by Anthony E. Pratt for "Cluedo" ("Clue" in the United States). "The Missing Card" takes a known set of cards (or other token) and removes one or more of them. By gathering information and using deduction and logic, the players
Mystery fiction contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism. Mystery fiction may involve a supernatural mystery where the solution does not have to be logical, and even no crime involved. This usage was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, where titles such as "Dime Mystery", "Thrilling Mystery" and "Spicy Mystery" offered what at the time were described as "weird menace" stories—supernatural horror in the vein of "Grand Guignol". This contrasted with parallel titles of the same names which contained conventional hardboiled crime fiction. The first use of "mystery" in this sense was by