I think this is a great game for people interested in practising their logical deduction skills.
I was first introduced to this game digitally and, while game play is the same, the mechanics of playing physically are, unfortunately, necessarily unwieldy.
The punch-card system is a fantastic and ingenious throwback to the early days of computer programming, but with only 3 copies of each card, it seems likely that players in a 4-player game will end up having to wait when everyone wants to use the same card in their guess code.
I also found setup to be frustratingly tedious. Each game players must find and place the correct verifier and answer key cards before play can begin. While the effort to do this can be lessened by keeping the card sets sorted (which is how the game ships), this is handled automatically and instantaneously by the digital version I played.
Players each get their own investigation sheet for recording their guesses and findings. This is another aspect where the digital version outshines the physical. In the digital version each player effectively gets their own copy of each of the verifier cards, and can make notes directly on or beneath the cards themselves. In the physical version the investigation sheet is generic so players must record the verifier information themselves, or constantly shift focus between the sheet and the main game area to link their notes with the verifier details.
One place where the physical version probably trumps the digital is when playing nightmare mode. In this mode, the relationship between the verifiers and answer keys is unknown; players must deduce that as part of figuring out what each is verifying. The digital version does not provide an easy way of marking this relationship, so it is probably easier to write out the possibilities on the physical sheets.
All in all I think this is an excellent game, but I much prefer playing the digital version to the physical one.
