Portal Games POG1375 Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, Multicoloured

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Become immersed in the noir of a 1940s mystery with this board game inspired by classic detective stories The entire city of Los Angeles is open for players to explore for clues. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game – Season One, a.k.a. Detective: Season One, is a fully co-operative, deeply immersive board game in which 1-5 players take on the roles of investigators trying to solve a crime. Specific lead cards, Investigator cards, and Antares Database information will allow you to spend Authority tokens to perform actions. If you have the required amount of authority tokens, remove them from the game to spend them. Questioning When I first heard about Detective, the premise sounded like a breath of fresh air to the classic “who-dunnit” genre. Having to use actual detective skills and the fact the game even suggested that players write EVERYTHING down had my interest peaked! Far too many detective-style games try to lead the player to an outcome or try to guide the story too much and this is an instant turn off for that genre in my opinion. “Detective” on the other hand promised a completely “free” experience, one which would have an outcome very different for each player, depending how good of a detective they are. Detective: Season One, contains three stand-alone cases, meaning unlike the original you don’t need the same playgroup. Each case lasts 90-120 minutes rather than the three hours plus of the original. It is for one to five players and has stripped down mechanisms making it more accessible to players. Working the case

There are even some “ah-ha!” Moments in the database when you are matching evidence. Fingerprints and DNA are handled via an 8-digit code. When input, it lets you know the match strength to other pieces of evidence that you’ve already found. So that soil sample you are analyzing is also found on the shoe of someone you know was up to no good and now you have proof! Moments like these are a ton of fun. Can you gain the respect of the greatest fictional detective of all time? Players will need to look through the directory included with Consulting Detective to find leads for clues. You may want to also have a notebook and pen as taking notes and comparing what you have found are essential aspects of the game. As I said in the intro, while I really enjoyed the original Detective, there were some things I didn’t love about it. One was the length. Some cases took 3-4 hours which was just too long for me. It turned it into a game you had to plan your night around, rather than one to pull off the shelf and play. The other issue was that the mechanics sometimes got in the way of the game. Having to deal with authority tokens, stress tokens, and specific skill tokens to manage felt kind of unnecessary and took away from the best part of the game, lead discovery and deduction. The game uses an online database for you to log evidence and look things up.

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Each of these elements is set up according to the case and then the players are set free. Each crime scene that is investigated, each suspect that is interviewed and each piece of evidence that is analysed will usually give the players a lead, another nugget of information for them to continue their investigation. Apart from that, and the information on the app, it is very much up to the players to guide their own investigation.

The game cleverly does not tell you the answers to the questions until you tell it to, which means you can restart a case without huge spoilers. But of course, it will be easier the second time around. One final important note is that you will not be able to follow every lead card for a case, and you will not get a perfect score at the end of each case. Most cases require overtime to solve, and this reduces your final score. Final Score: 4.5 Stars – A more streamlined version of the original Detective that lets players focus on the fun and moves the rest to the side. Please note that the base box does not include Case 6: Suburbia, which is exclusively a convention case used on special events! This detective game is for players who want serious crime drama stories Players will travel to different locations to hunt for clues and interrogate suspects.

Take the job of a real detective in a modern setting! Solve mysterious crimes working as an Antares National Investigation Agency team member.

A nice little mechanic that is used is the simple timeline, most events taking up a specified amount of time, the players allowed to work at any time of day, but be warned, work any longer than eight hours and you will start working OVERTIME. Each case, the players are given overtime tokens and each hour of overtime worked means one spent token. Run out of tokens and the detectives run themselves into the ground and you fail the case. Blood, Ink, and Tears moves the action to Great Britain, where players visit an old mansion and discover family secrets from the past that lead them to clues behind the mysterious death of the family patron. Fans of Agatha Christie’s novels will find themselves at home in this rather funny case! Different from the original is that players will have one day to solve the crime presented by the case. They do this by choosing a lead card to investigate each round. This will involve spending some time, the game’s main resource. Each lead will take anywhere from 1-3 hours of your day. The card will then give you information in the form of an interview with a suspect or witness, examining a location, or other forms of police work. Occasionally a card will let you “dig deeper” by spending a skill token. This lets you flip over the card for extra information that may or may not be relevant to your investigation. In Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, you are detectives trying to unravel the mystery. In this section, we’ll go through HOW you do that. Leads Note: In the upper right of the board, we've provided cabinets to allow you to store Plot cards and Discovered cards to be used in later cases, simply drag them into these containers when you finish a case, and out again when you start a new one.When a lead card has a token icon, this is “Dig Deeper,” If you have the correct token in your skill pool or a wild token and the team thinks you should flip it over. You take the token from your collection and remove it from play. Then flip the card and read on in the story. If you choose not to or can not flip the card with the “Dig Deeper,” it is essential to note that you will not be allowed to do this action later in the game. The players can review all lead cards they have already uncovered at any time, but only the sides you have already read. Plot Cards The shorter playtime also means it doesn't lend itself to being an entertaining evening of a murder mystery. For that, I'd still recommend the original Detective game or a stand-alone murder mystery evening game.