“Wait, so this guy is the kid of this one?”
“I think so. And he is the kid of this one.”
“Is that the guy from the same unit? What was the abbreviation on the photo again?”
“Yup, checks out. So then this guy starts working at that guy’s company in the ’50s, and…”
“All right, but why did they kill him?”
Overview
Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game (which is just the worst title, and shall henceforth be referred to as Detective) is a crime-solving deduction game. The base box contains five tightly connected cases, which form a large, cohesive story. You play as agents of a high-tech (how high-tech, you ask? very high-tech, but more on that later…) detective agency. Initially, you are tasked with a high-profile but rather innocent-looking case. However, as you dig deeper and deeper, and untangle the decades-old mysteries, get to know witnesses and their hidden connections, you soon find yourself down a very deep rabbit hole.
Similar to other deduction games
The premise is very similar to other deduction games, like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or Chronicles of Crime. You read an intro, receive some starting clues: if you want to talk to the witness, go to clue X, if you want to check the lab results, go to clue Y, etc. The leads of the five cases are organised in five decks, each consisting of 35 numbered cards, most of them representing visiting locations or talking to witnesses. In each round, you as a group decide which lead to follow and hopefully get new ones.
Once you feel like you know what’s going on, or run out of time, you can call it a day, bring up the questions to the case, and try to answer them correctly. As always with games like these, there is no GOTCHA card. You will never be entirely sure what the solution is, you will need to deduce based on multiple sources.
So how is this challenging, you might ask? Well, for one thing, even with reading all the information, the case might not be straightforward. You probably need to keep some notes, refer back to earlier cases, then obscure-looking references, small details, etc. However, you are also pressed for time: each case has a time limit, a couple of days most. Clues take time to follow, and you also have to travel to different locations like the lab, the courthouse, or the HQ. There is an option to work overtime, but you accumulate stress that way, which will have negative impacts. You will simply never be able to see the whole picture so you need to carefully think about which story knots to untangle: you want to avoid spending long hours on a red herring!
Unlike other deduction games
If you played with any of the aforementioned similar games, you might think you have already played this game. Don’t be fooled, Detective is a unique work of art, there are a number of great twists to the base formula.
The main and most obvious one is the computer system. When you start the campaign, you actually need to go to a website, register, log in, and you will gain access to an online databank. This acts as the in-game detective agency database. You can bring up detailed interrogation notes, personal files, pictures, etc. Every time you find a fingerprint or a DNA sample, you enter the code representing it in your database, and from that point on, you can crossreference them against other clues you find, even from later cases! The owner of a fingerprint you found on a window in Case 1 might only be revealed in Case 5.
You are also encouraged to simply just Google things. Investigating a weird division from World War II? Well, they actually exist, just check them out on Wikipedia. There are even cases when you have to use Google Maps to check out a building or streets in a certain city. Needless to say, this makes the game very immersive.
There are a couple other interesting additions to the base formula of the deduction game:
- As soon as you learn something about a person of interest, you unlock their portrait, and you are encouraged to build a mind map with them. You know, place them in an organisation chart, connect them with strings, etc.
- Quite often, when you follow a clue, you can opt to dig deeper, but you need to spend extra time and some resources.
- The agents you play as have unique abilities. (Not mind-blowing, mind you, but still, they have some speciality.)
- Occasionally, when you unravel a plot point, it might not be relevant for your current case but will play a role in the big picture. Whenever that happens, you are instructed to place a plot card into a future deck, so the importance will only be revealed later.
The Good
Detective is a very satisfying and unique take on the deductive crime-solving game, both in terms of story-telling and presentation.
The story that delivers
Let’s not beat around the bush: this is the first really satisfying deduction game I have ever played. You know that feeling when a game like this seems to promise these deep underlying secrets and ghosts of the past, only to leave you mentally blue-balled in the end? That does not happen with Detective. At all. The entangling mystery keeps entangling, up until a loud crescendo at the end. There were genuine, audible gasps from us whenever we stumbled upon an unexpected and cleverly built up twist.
Honestly, there was a twist in the end, that I still don’t understand how we did not notice, and it’s been building up from the start of the game, and it was clever and oh-so-satisfying, using simple game mechanics and unsaid but quite straightforward rules.
The level of story-telling in this game is on the level of a bad crime novel. And I do encourage you to think about that statement and appreciate that it’s a compliment! Yes, the story in this board game is as good as a bad book, and that is very high praise!
The story starts out innocent, very PG-13, with a stolen watch. But as you add more and more layers of complications and relationships between characters and missing links and decades-old crimes coming back to haunt, a much darker, much more sinister picture will emerge. And, I can’t stress this enough, it is immensely satisfying to dig up all that darkness.
There are also very few errors. Starting a game like this is always a leap of faith because you always risk spending hours on a badly proofread mess that is literally unsolvable. (Looking at you, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, and your wonderful “let’s make a new edition but forget to update half the names in a case” approach, you flawed masterpiece you!) There was a typo on one of the cards in Detective, but it also came with an errata in the computer system, and that was it. Oh, and there is a case when it tries to be too clever, more on that later. But I’m used to at least one unsolvable case per deduction game, so this one was beyond my wildest dreams!
The website
One of the big selling points of the game is the website that you have to use parallel to the cards in the physical game. It works great, we encountered zero bugs while using it. It sounds kinda gimmicky, I agree, but it soon becomes clear how essential it is for the whole game. There is literally no other way how the designers could have done this. Using things like partial DNA matches, watching videos representing security camera footage, reading long and detailed court cases would not be possible without the site. It is flawlessly integrated with the cards, you might get a clue in a card leading to a website entry and vice versa.
It’s also a great anti-cheat mechanism. You can’t just read everything, or check how many paragraphs you missed, you have to enter the valid source of the clue to read one. The final report, when you answer questions about the case, is also done by the website.
There are a dozen other fun and clever ways how this site is utilised. Every scenario starts with a Previously on Detective video that you can watch. It puts a very cute TV series vibe on the whole thing. You are encouraged to search things on Google Maps, Wikipedia, etc, and I’m not going to spoil anything, there are a few funny ones. (Along with a couple of funny players who left reviews of in-game locations on Google Maps!)
Immersion
At this point, I would like to segue into another great aspect of the game: immersion. Yes, the computer system adds a lot to that, but there are other small nuances that really help.
The production value is quite high. You usually don’t notice that in the age when every game has to come with a kilogram of medium-quality plastic minis, but I really appreciate the small touches. For example, all the court case documents you can look into have an era-specific font and graphs etc. The cards are also full of small and easy-to-miss details. There are a lot of mechanics, like looking for clues in the pictures, that only come up once, and as such, they require a really investigative attitude to notice.
One other thing that I found very interesting and immersive is the mind map. As you unlock characters, you get their portraits and you can arrange them in a nice tabloid to remind yourself of their role and position in the story. There are dozens of these, and depending on the choices you take, you might not discover all of them. We missed a few.
In general, it really felt like we are investigating a crime, easily the most immersive detective game I have played so far.
The Bad
That’s all great and all, but there are a few problems of the game. These make me quite sad, I think they would have been easy to amend, but as such, we are very far from an amazing game.
Couple of bad apples
Yeah, there are some issues with some cases. The base formula works great, but whenever they tried to do something clever, something went wrong.
For example, in Case 3, you have to use a real-life map, of a real-life city, and pinpoint the location where something will probably happen. (Spoiler-free phrasing is difficult!) The issue was that we knew exactly where we would go in real life. But for the love of the god of games could not figure out how the game wants us to decode that into the game. It all comes down to an unfortunate mistranslation and probably unawareness of how streets work in the U.S.
The same case also has a very overwritten clue that then turns out to be not as important. Based on a boardgamegeek forum we were not the only ones finding this utterly confusing.
Some cases are great, well structured, and you can start multiple threads, follow them through, get a piece of the puzzle, and try to come up with an answer based on what you know. Had you followed a different lead right at the beginning, you would have different pieces now, but you could come to the same conclusions. However, there are also cases where you kinda have to get lucky. Maybe you have five leads when you begin, and you have time for three. However, there is one of them that you have to pick if you want a chance of solving the case.
Pointless mechanics
This is a minor issue, but the mechanics could have been finetuned a bit more.
Each detective has a special skill, they usually come down to whether or not you can press on a certain clue with your limited resources. We found that most of the special skills are very situational, and hardly used any of them over the course of the game.
There is also one regular action that you can do – in exchange for an AT, you can write a report for an hour or something like that. AT is a resource that is very easy to come by, whereas time is by far the most pressing limit in the game. So we literally never used this action. Imagine if, in Pandemic, it turns out that you never ever want to take a charter flight.
The flavour text
Detective is very flavour-text heavy. Not as bad as the worst, like Sherlock Holmes: Jack the Ripper game, but it’s close. There is a lot of reading, and as mentioned earlier, the writing is on the level of a bad crime novel.
We could not decide if the story is intentionally goofy and funny or not. If the former, it does it in a subtle way. Almost every paragraph mentions the hyper super high tech detective agency that we work at and then details some aspect of aforementioned hightechness. For example, getting lab results in an email. Or getting data from a database using filters. Automatically! It required some roleplaying from us but we made it work.
Also, we are constantly eating something in-game, not sure why that is.
The end
(Spoiler-free)
So. This might be me being butt-hurt.
We played the game pretty consistently. Took our time, considering all the options, kept notes, etc. But in the last case, even though I think we played well, we had to cheat a couple of hours. I’m sorry, but if I play a game for 15 hours, get immersed in the story, I refuse to accept that I get the “bad ending” just because the clues that I followed in the last game turned out to be random dead ends.
I get that it’s realistic, and I also get that it’s a very difficult game design choice. If you make it too easy, it won’t feel like a challenge. Still, it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. There was a huge twist, but we did not feel like we earned it, which lessened the impact a bit. I think the game could have used a bit more playtesting here. Let’s make sure that we are not punishing the players for rationally following leads.
Will I ever play this again?
Two issues on that front.
First of all, the computer system has the same problems as the games that come with an app. Namely: if I take this game off the shelf 20 years from now, will the website still be there? Because the game is literally unplayable without it. It’s quite weird how they did not make this a downloadable program that you can just keep on your computer. It’s not like you can play the game without the physical parts.
And second, while Detective is not a legacy game per se, you have to have bad memory to play it more than once, unless a lot of time has passed. I think a lot of twists, so the best parts of the game, are very memorable.
The Co-Op
It’s what you would expect. Brainstorming, mostly. You either like that kind of co-operation or you don’t, we had a blast with theorising and trying to fill up holes in the story.
The Recommendation
Detective has its fair share of problems, but it’s the best deductive game I have played as of now. If you want to get into the genre, this is the game I would recommend.
A few reviews I read/watched on this game made it out to be a dry and serious game. It certainly looks less childish than for example Chronicles of Crime, it is more realistic than Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. And no, it’s definitely not a party game.
But don’t be fooled, I think Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game is a fun and well-paced game.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | Deduction |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 5 |
| Length | 15 hours for the campaign |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Great |
| Co-Operation | Good |