I played all 5 cases of Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game solo.

No Spoilers here!

Take the job of a real detective, solving mysterious crimes while working as Antares National Investigation Agency team members.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game Game Play

It seems weird to go over the rules in a game like this. It’s not a ‘rules’ game, although there are actual rules. So what I’ll do is just (very, very loosely) go over what you do so you have the info to see if it’s a game for you. Of course, staying spoiler-free.

It’s almost like a choose-your-own-adventure game. The casebook will give you an intro and some starting clues for you to investigate. It’ll say something like “Talk to Jill Valentine 106 Fieldwork”. That means to talk to Jill, you need to read card 106, but also move your car to the Fieldwork spot on the board.

Moving a spot takes 1 hour which you move on the track at the bottom of the board. Also, each card you read tells you how much time it took to do what you’re doing. When you hit 4 pm you call it a day. You can push into the red overtime section but you take stress tokens for negative points.

You may also have some codes for fingerprints, DNA, interviews, personal files etc on the Antares database. This is a website that acts as a crime database that not only gives you additional content but it’s also where you input your final score.

The only other important info is the characters and tokens. You have characters with abilities and they also give you tokens. Some cards will say “Spend a token of this type to get some further info”, usually on the other side of the card.

At the end of the game, you answer some questions just like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and you get a score.

Theme

It’s very good…

You have leads to follow and clues to discover. The cards and online bits have some detail that tells a story and paints quite a good picture.

The double-sided cards, online pages and notes you’re making give you a lot of stuff to go on giving you a great investigative feeling. Cases are not linear so if you follow up on one lead, it uses up time and resources. This may prevent you from following up on some other lead.

Setup & Rulebook

The setup is very very simple. There is a VERY small basic setup and then a few notes in the case book about what changes during this case.

But, this is a Portal games rulebook so I had no idea how to play without the help of Youtube.

Components & Artwork

The few non-card components are quite nice. They’re minimal but they need to be really, the focus should be on the Detective work.

The Antares database you use online, which is technically a component, is very good. It works really well and its multimedia formats that are used again add to the immersive gameplay.

I’m glad I was next to my PC to use this and not on my iPhone/iPad. Small text aside, it was easy to move back and forth between pages.

The art on the game pieces is mostly (stock?) photos but the graphic design is pretty good.

However, the codes you have on cards that you input into the database could have been clearer. The font is a little small but they also use pairings of letters and numbers that are hard to tell apart, especially in the font they used. 0O, 1I, Z2, S5, B8 etc Quite a few times I had to make several attempts to get it right.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s an open information co-op with no real-time element… Of course, this is easy to teach and is very accessible. In fact, don’t teach it. Just read the intro then go through your current options, that should do it.

If you ask a new gamer to think like a Detective they will know what to do.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game Summary

There are obvious comparisons here to Chronicles of Crime with its similar detective-style play and they came out around the same time. Oh, and they both use a digital element.

I figured after playing CoC first and it has that cool crime scene gimmick that I’d like it much more. It’s not that I like it more, but I don’t like it less either… I feel a Game vs Game coming on…

The Game

In Detective, you are looking for clues and trying to discover as much as you can to answer questions at the end of the game. The deck of cards for each case is quite big and you’re not going to get through all of them. You don’t have the time, the skill tokens and/or the lead available to follow that will get to uncover more cards.

Not that discovering as many cards as possible is the point you just need to uncover important ones and pick up the right tips.

Cards

The cards are weird. Quite a few are 90% exposition and 10% case-relevant detail. Take a shot every time the story says you grab a coffee and a sandwich. It’s not bad, but a lot of it is not really needed to set the scene and I just wanted to get to the point. I wouldn’t like to have to read each card out to a group.

Antares

The internet app is nice and does the job apart from the codes being hard to read. It does a good job of letting you further investigate and lookup clues and relationships etc

Internet

The game was using ‘you can use the internet’ as a selling point but you only need it to look up real historic things and ONLY when instructed. This whole thing could have been ignored with a “you can look up further information about this here”.

Content

The rulebook and tutorial video all say to take your time and discuss things in a group. They also say not just to try and uncover as many cards as possible.

The truth is there is 5 hours of content in the box, around 1 hour per case. Playing solo (so no table-talk) and skimming the exposition text to get to the good stuff cut down the time.

But, it was 4 enjoyable hours, I didn’t do case 5. The ones I did play were all slightly different and good fun, well worth your time.

Jesta ThaRogue