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

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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. I should warn you though that Detective can be a real brain burner with lots of leads, names, and clues to remember. You definitely don’t want to play when you are tired or distracted. You need to be well organized and pay a lot of attention to detail if you hope to solve any of these cases. However for an investigative game, there isn’t a better tabletop experience and I can’t wait for more cases to play! 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. Study an enormous illustration to answer a series of questions in this Where’s Wally? style game. Carefully looking for clues across the game's map is the key to succeeding at MicroMacro: Crime City. Despite its quirks, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game is one of my favorite investigative games. I really liked the modern aspect of it and using an actual computer database was a ton of fun. The game even went on to win two of our 2018 Board Game Awards. Yet despite its accolades, there were a few things I wasn’t thrilled about in the game. Detective went a bit overboard on the mechanical nature of the game and sometimes the writing got overly verbose.

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. Detective: Season One is a new product in the award-winning Detective line, one with a shorter playing time that’s tailored for a mystery game night with simpler family-friendly rules. The game consists of three standalone cases, and each of them can be played in around 90 minutes. Each of the cases challenges players with different settings and styles. The cases are: Detective” relies heavily on the Antares web app, a “detective database” which players will interact with to bring up transcripts of interviews with suspects, search the data of said suspects and also compare fingerprints that are found at the crime scene (it is a string of digits and characters that make up the fingerprints and material data so you can compare them to evidence). All the information is obtained using the number system that is also used with the cards so navigating the game and the app is no problem at all. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game manages to take an underused genre and really take it into an exciting new direction. App integration always runs the risk of being a distraction or novelty instead of improving the game. Yet in Detective, it not only works beautifully, but it helps immerse you even more into the theme than the game would without it. The story line of Detective is pretty intriguing and I really appreciated how not every case played out in the same way. They really throw you some curve balls, just wait until you get to case 3, easily my favorite! I managed to play this at Tabletop Gaming Live and took on a case which tasked us to find the killer, the motive and also various other details that were perhaps deemed irrelevant while working the case (I loved this element as it kept us on our toes and pushed us to really dig into the case files, like real detectives). What’s in the Box?Detective comes with 5 cases in the box, each of which is linked together over the course of a campaign ( note: this is not a legacy game). Learning to play is fairly straightforward. Each player controls a character with a skill token and a special ability. For lower player counts, consultants are used that only provide 2 skill tokens. Each player gets a character with a unique ability and a skill token. Any amateur sleuth who has played Cluedo – called Clue in the US - knows it just doesn’t cut it when it comes to being a good detective board game. Players want juicy mysteries, to piece together clues on a big whiteboard with pieces of red string and have a flip-up notebook at hand. Best detective board games Detective: A Modern Crime Game (Portal Games) is a brilliant new concept on the crime game genre, encouraging players to break the fourth wall and use every resource they can get their hands on to help solve each case included with the game. In our overview, you will find a spoiler-free description of the game, along with details of the components and gameplay. Our Game Overviews strive to be informative and impartial. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game is a fully cooperative game for 1- 5 players and is suitable for ages 16 & up due to the nature of the content in the game. Detective is considered a Campaign game and is played over five sessions, each having you solve a different case. Each case is related, and how you solve one case will impact subsequent cases. Detective, as the name suggests, is a game of deduction. You will have to use your interpretation skills and reading between the lines to figure out which clues are important and which aren’t. As members of the Antares National Investigation Agency, it is your task to unravel the mysteries and save the day. Game Components

Enter, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game – Season one. A game definitely aiming to win the award for 2020's longest game title award.

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Deception Murder in Hong Kong allows players to step into the role of investigator by giving them the tools to hunt down a killer hidden amongst a bunch of innocents. Taking place in the city of Hong Kong, each player will take it in turns to try to locate the murder weapon and a key piece of evidence, before tying both to the murder.

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.Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game – Season One took many of my gripes from the original game and dumped them into a blender. What emerged was a more streamlined game that puts the focus on where it should be: investigating leads and solving crimes. If I was to ask anyone to name a board game that saw players attempting to identify a killer by analysing both the crime scene and the clues left behind, you could be sure the majority of those people would answer Cluedo (Clue for our American friends). While this game would fit into this category, it’s fair to say it doesn’t involve any “real” detective work and the way you get to find the killer is a frantic finger-pointing race. Portal Games want to change that. I managed to play this at Tabletop Gaming Live and took on a case which tasked us to find the killer, the motive and also various other details that were perhaps deemed irrelevant while working the case (I loved this element as it kept us on our toes and pushed us to really dig into the case files, like real detectives). What's in the Box?

Each case will have a time limit and after that time has elapsed, the players must decide on the answers to the given criteria, be that who the killer was and what weapon was used for example. The answers are selected from within the app, the app giving the players a final score out of 40. There isn’t necessarily a win or a lose scenario, but simply a scale on how good of a detective you are! Thoughts Next to pieces of information either on the lead cards or in the Antares database, you will see words underlined with a wifi-like symbol next to it. This symbol denotes that you can use the internet to look up this bit of information. This game takes place within the real world, and as such many historical events play into the cases. The information you will find while doing these searches will help give greater context to the case and may even help you solve the case directly. Investigator Special Abilities The game went on to be well received and win a number of awards. However, some players felt that it took too long and the parts to read too verbose. A new Sherriff in town The central mystery is genuinely fascinating, and gains a real-world intrigue from Detective’s welcome sprinkling of real life into its fiction – at points, you’ll find yourself using Google Maps to identify possible crime scenes, browsing Wikipedia to swot up on World War II divisions that characters belonged to and solving riddles with little more than a search engine and your intuition. The game isn’t punishing if you’re anything less than Poirot – there are enough helpful hints to at least nudge you in the right direction – but working for the answers for real makes solving each case a thoroughly rewarding few hours.September 20 th, Manchester, England. A Mysterious parcel has arrived at HQ. Within it is a box containing the clues to three potential murders. My colleagues and I must work to solve these crimes and provide justice for the bereaved families. It’s time to grab a strong coffee and start piecing together what’s happened here. It’s time to be a detective, in Detective: Seasons One! Digging through the Archives