I picked up a new game called
Detective: A Modern Crime on Friday and tried it out with a group of actor friends today. It was quite interesting. It's a co-operative game where 1-5 players are given a crime to solve within a set amount of time. Once the time limit is reached, players must answer a series of questions to see how well they did on their investigation. What makes the game different is that you need to use the online app (which functions like a police computer database) as well as the actual internet to conduct research and examine clues.
At the start of the game, each player chooses a character to play and each character has a unique ability as well as a skill token that they commit to a common pool. If there are less than 5 players, the unused character cards are flipped over and become NPC consultants that add extra skill tokens into a common pool. Skills consist of perception, research, tech, interrogation, or wild and are added into a pool of authority tokens.
Each starts with some explanatory text in a case book followed by a list of available evidence, persons of interest, and crime scene/point of interest locations that the players can investigate. The players decide as a group on how to proceed. All officers must act together (no splitting up the group) and once an action is chosen, players either use the app/internet to look up information or pull a numbered card from a case deck made up of 100+ double sided cards. Each action eats up a number of hours (traveling from location to location on the city map also eats up time) and may also require the use of a skill or an authority token. Information is then revealed and this may provide new leads or require players to decide if they want to spend more time/tokens in order to dig deeper and possibly learn more from a given suspect/location/piece of evidence.
Each regular day lasts from 8 am til 4 pm after which the investigators can either call it quits for the day or they can decide to work overtime and continue working. Each extra hour worked past 4 pm causes stress which will lower your end game score. There is a hard limit for the amount of stress you can incur in a scenario and if that limit is reached, the investigation ends and players must go to the final quiz even if they hadn't reached the case's time limit.
The game comes with 5 cases, each of which should take 3-4 hours of play time to resolve. The cases tie together into a grand campaign and clues found in case #1 may not become relevant until case #3 for example.
The game reminds me a bit of the
Sherlock Holmes games, but this is much more involved. They throw a tonne of data at you and the time limits imposed means that there is no way you'll be able to follow up on every lead/clue before time runs out.
We did reasonably well on our first case and managed to crack it with a 70% score. Everyone enjoyed themselves and wants to continue on with the story but we all thought the writing was a bit weak (they really like to spend a lot of time discussing what everyone eats and drinks along the way) and some of their attempts to make things sound gritty and
noire are laughably bad. The case itself was very interesting though and the fact that much of it was based on real world events that you can look up on wikipedia added a lot to the immersion.
If you like solving crimes and don't mind some cringe-worthy exposition, you might want to give this one a whirl.
