Sherlock Holmes Game: Five Ways to Play Detective on Baker Street
If you want a Sherlock Holmes game, there are five good ways to play one today. You can solve cases with friends from the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective boxes. You can play one of the Frogwares video games as Holmes himself. You can run a Victorian mystery night at the table with a roleplaying game. You can read the original stories as the puzzle they always were, and try to beat Holmes to the answer. Or you can step inside Conan Doyle’s London as your own character, with a narrator that has read the stories and answers whatever you type. Which one suits you depends on whether you want a group, a screen, a table, a book, or a fog-bound street of your own.
This guide goes through all five, says who each one is for, and ends with how to try the last one tonight without paying anything.
What people want from a Sherlock Holmes game
“Sherlock Holmes game” covers a few different wishes. It helps to know which is yours before you pick.
- You want to solve a real case. Read the clues, follow the leads, name the culprit, and see whether you were right. This is the puzzle wish.
- You want to be Holmes. Walk the scenes, examine the evidence and make the deductions with his eyes. This is the video game wish.
- You want an evening with friends. A table, a mystery, and everyone arguing over who did it.
- You want to live in the world of the stories. Baker Street, the Irregulars, Scotland Yard and Mrs Hudson, as Conan Doyle wrote them, with you as a new face among them. This is the reader’s wish.
The table shows where each option lands.
The five options side by side
| Consulting Detective | Frogwares video games | Tabletop mystery night | The original stories | Play inside the canon | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Boxed case books and a map | Detective games for PC and console | A roleplaying game run by one player | Four novels and 56 short stories | Written game in a browser |
| Players | 1 or more, together | Just you | A small group plus a host | Just you | Just you |
| Who is the detective | You and your friends | Holmes, played by you | Characters your group invents | Holmes, while you guess along | Your own character |
| Story | Fixed cases with a set answer | Written by the studio | Written by the host | Written by Conan Doyle | Grows from your choices, grounded in the stories |
| Best for | Group puzzle solvers | Players who want to be Holmes | Groups with a keen host | Readers who like a fair puzzle | Readers who want the world itself |
The claims about each game below are as of September 2026, read from the publishers’ own pages and store listings.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, the case books
This is the one most people mean when they say “a Sherlock Holmes game”. Each box holds a set of cases, a map of London, a directory and a newspaper. You read the opening of a case, decide which addresses to visit, read the passage for each, and when you think you know the answer you turn to the questions at the back. Then you compare your route with Holmes’s. He is usually annoyingly quicker.
Space Cowboys publishes the series today, and its own page sums it up in five words:
“The cooperative investigation game!”
The same page lists four standalone boxes in the main series: The Thames Murders & other cases, Carlton House & Queen’s Park, Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures, and The Baker Street Irregulars. It also offers a free demo you can download, which is the easiest way to see whether the format suits you.
Pick it if you want a real, fair puzzle and a few friends (or a patient evening alone) to argue it out with.
It is weaker for anyone who wants to be a character. You read and decide where to go, but nobody answers back, and once you have solved a case it is spent: the answer does not change.
The Frogwares video games
Frogwares has made Sherlock Holmes games for many years, and several are still sold on Steam. Two of the newest are the ones to start with. Steam describes Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, released in November 2021, as a game where “a young Sherlock Holmes struggles to prove himself” on a Mediterranean island while investigating his mother’s death. Sherlock Holmes The Awakened, released in April 2023, is a rebuilt version of an older game that sends Holmes into “the heart of the terrifying Cthulhu Mythos”. The older titles, such as Crimes and Punishments and The Devil’s Daughter, are still on the store too.
Pick them if you want to be Holmes himself, look at the crime scenes with your own eyes, and have a studio’s full production behind the story.
They are weaker for a reader who wants the world of the books. These are new stories in Holmes’s name, written by the studio, and every player meets the same case and the same ending. You also need a gaming PC or console.
A tabletop mystery night
A group of friends can play in Victorian London with a tabletop roleplaying game. One person acts as the host, prepares a mystery, and describes the scenes. Everyone else plays a character: a doctor, a street urchin, an inspector who is tired of being made to look foolish by a man in a deerstalker. Many general mystery and Victorian roleplaying games work for this, and a simple home-made set of rules can too.
Pick it if you have a regular group and one person who enjoys planning a mystery. The stories you make together are the best a table can offer.
It is weaker for anyone without that group, and it asks a lot of the host, who has to plant fair clues and keep track of who knew what, and when.
The original stories as a puzzle
The oldest Sherlock Holmes game is the one Conan Doyle invented. Holmes sees the same clues Watson does, and Watson tells you what they were. The game is to stop at the moment Holmes says he knows, and work it out before you turn the page.
The stories are also easy to get. Project Gutenberg, the free library of public domain books, lists The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of the Four and the other collections on its page for Conan Doyle, free to read or download.
Pick it if you like a quiet evening with a book and a pencil, and enjoy catching the clue the first time through.
It is weaker for anyone who wants to act. Holmes solves every case whether or not you do, and the story goes exactly one way.
Playing inside the canon as your own character
The fifth way is the newest. You give a narrator the stories themselves, and it reads them before you begin: the streets and rooms, the people, how they speak, what they know and what they hide. Then you make your own character and type what you do. There is no list of choices. You can take lodgings near Baker Street, join the Irregulars, clerk for Scotland Yard, or turn up at 221B with a problem of your own, and the narrator keeps the world consistent with what Conan Doyle wrote.
This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a book as a .txt or .epub
file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world (characters, factions,
places, items and events) before your first scene. Sherlock Holmes suits it
unusually well, because the stories are in the public domain: the free
Project Gutenberg edition described above is a book you can upload. Each
collection becomes its own game. The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the moor,
plays nothing like the fog and cabs of A Study in Scarlet.
Pick it if what you want is to stay in Holmes’s London as yourself, and you would rather talk your way into a case tonight than learn a rulebook first.
It is weaker for players who want a fixed puzzle with one right answer to check. It is a written story, read and typed, and it grows from what you do rather than from a sealed solution at the back of the book. It also plays alone rather than at a table.
For the wider field, see AI roleplaying and solo role playing games. If you enjoy a story you type into, our guide to interactive fiction games covers the wider tradition, and if a mystery for a group is what you are after, games for book club has more ideas.
What it takes to start each one
| Option | How to start | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Consulting Detective | Download the free demo or buy a box | A table, and friends if you like |
| Frogwares video games | Buy one on Steam or a console store | A gaming PC or console |
| Tabletop mystery night | Pick a set of rules and plan a case | A group and a willing host |
| The original stories | Download them from Project Gutenberg | Something to read on |
| LLM RPG | Open the site in a browser | Nothing for the first five turns |
With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all, and signing up adds free credits. The current plans are on the pricing page.
How to start a Sherlock Holmes game tonight
If playing inside the stories sounds like your kind of game, this is the whole path from nothing to your first scene.
- Try it with no account. Open a ready-made world and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
- Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password.
- Download the stories. Pick the collection or novel you want to live in
from Project Gutenberg, as a
.txtor.epubfile. - Upload the book. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play, and you are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent.
- Make your character. A medical student who shares a cab with Watson, a housemaid who saw something she should not have, a young constable out of his depth. You are a new person in the stories’ world, so you can be anyone.
- Type what you do. “I ask Mrs Hudson whether Mr Holmes is in.” “I follow the man with the scarred hand into the fog.” The narrator answers in the book’s voice and remembers what you did, including the lies you told.
When a box, a console or a book is the better choice
Be honest about the evening you want. If you want a fair puzzle with a real answer to check, Consulting Detective is still the best Sherlock Holmes game there is, and its free demo costs you nothing to find out. If you want to be Holmes on a big screen, the Frogwares games do that with care. If you have a group and a keen host, a tabletop mystery night makes stories nobody else will ever have. And if you have never read the stories, start there, because every other option on this list is better once you know them.
A written game fits a different moment: you have just finished The Hound of the Baskervilles, the fire is lit, and you want to stay in that world a little longer as someone of your own. That is the moment it was built for.