I Detect a Board Game

One of the more buzzed-about games at this year's GenCon sold out before I could snag a copy. But a few months later, my group got their hands on one, and have since been playing Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game.

Detective is one of a few new games trying to live at unusual intersection. It's a mystery game, where the players work cooperatively to solve crimes. It's kinda-sorta Legacy, in that it features five distinct cases (connected in a serialized story) that you can play through just once. (But you could reset the box at the end and gift it on to people who didn't play -- or sit on it a few years and play again when you don't remember the details, I suppose.) You connect with a web site while you play and enter crime scene data you collect for "lab testing" and cross-referencing. Some of the details mentioned in the cases are real world tie-ins -- you can actually pull out a smart phone or laptop or whatever and Google for information.

We've now played through the entire five-case story, and I can say that overall I did enjoy it. But I also have a few reservations. For one, it's debatable how "game-like" this experience really is. It's at least as game-like as an escape room (and there are plenty of board game versions of those), which is a decent start. There are also choices to be made, as each case has a fixed amount of time and actions you can take, and thus only so much information you can uncover before the case closes and you must make your final report. That report is scored, as well, which introduces the game-like desire to want to replay and see if you could do better. (Though you can't. You now know the solution.)

It's also like other cooperative board games in that it feels like the game is very much stacked against you. With the limited number of actions your team has, there's absolutely no way to "do it all." So you have to discuss and agree on where to spend your efforts, hoping it will lead to answers. But the story is dense enough, and crafted with enough intrigue, that it can also feel like a mystery novel you only get to read half of before you're forced to guess the ending.

On the clear plus side, each of the five cases feels very different from one another. Some introduce different mechanics (enough to further justify it as a game and not merely an interactive story). And the mysteries generally have enough suspects and interesting twists to feel challenging and fun. On the minus side, the fifth and final case doesn't quite feel fair. Our group knew a big part of "the answer" early on, but could not uncover the rest before time ran out on us. Since we were then done with the game, we went through all the information to see what path could have taken us there... and found out there really wasn't one. (Not as explicitly as in earlier cases, anyway.)

Some aspects of the game are hit or miss. Each player nominally has a character with an ability you can use, but as the game has no individualized turn structure, it just becomes something for the group to deploy together. The "you can actually search for this on Google" has mixed results. In the first case or two, it's a real dud of an element, with web searches really just turning out "I guess that's intriguing" background information you don't really need to solve the cases. Fortunately, later cases worked this feature in brilliantly, making web searches a fun and vital piece of finding your answers.

Overall, I'd rate the experience a B. Decent fun, though admittedly I'm already looking forward to trying Chronicles of Crime, another game playing in a similar space. Still, if Detective sounds interesting to you, you probably won't be disappointed if you pick up a copy.