Do you think you have what it takes to be the very best detective? Now is your chance to prove it. Take on the role of fearless and formidable detective Claire Harper, and show off your skills in observing, discovering, and cracking the case. Figure out whodunit, and answer all the questions surrounding the crime to close the case for good! Let’s check it out.

What Is It?

Cooperative – Players work as a team to solve the case

Storytelling – Players will work their way through various cases, trying to solve the crimes. Each case will progress through a deck of cads, with players selecting their next card based on numbers found on previous cards showing people to talk to, rooms to explore, or items to find.

Deduction – As players uncover information, they’ll jot down answers to various questions as their attempts to solve the case. The less cards they look at to get the correct answers, the better their score.

Who Is It For?

  • 1 or more players – Personally, I like it best at 2, just so I have someone else to bounce ideas/theories/answers off of. Gameplay is linear, and there’s no puzzles to solve, or anything to do separately, so there’s not really enough to pass around for a large group, in my opinion.
  • Ages 12 and up – Definitely a tricky game to do well in. Some content (i.e. murder) may not be suitable for younger audiences
  • Fans of deduction/crime-solving
    • Fans of Chronicles of Crime who are looking for something similar, without an app
  • Players who don’t mind a lot of reading in games, and flipping through/re-referencing cards

Variants

Competitive Scoring – While the game is cooperative, if players can’t agree on answers to the questions, they can answer separately and compare scores at the end. I’m not a big fan of this myself because players still have to work together throughout the game, and can’t take different paths so it just seems like you would work together to come to one solution since you’ve seen everything at the same time. But, if this appeals to you, go for it!

PROS

  • Components – Nice size cards, everything is clear on cards and documents
  • Rules – Small rule set, easy to follow
  • Easy set-up
  • Story – engaging and detailed stories in each mystery
  • Unique scoring system – it’s interesting to see how few cards you can solve it in
    • I like that you can guess answers early, but change them later, and that you can eventually see all the cards before making final guesses, even though your score might be lower
  • Though it’s a single-play game, nothing gets destroyed, so you can pass it on to someone else, or save it for another play in the future when you’ve forgotten the solutions

CONS

  • Replay value – Really just a one-time play, unless you wait a long tim before playing again
  • Solution Questions – Some of the questions had very generic/open-ended wording (think something like “what events led up to the crime?”) With no indication of how detailed your response needed to be, so it was sometimes hard to know what exactly it was asking
    • On top of that, a few reasonings in some solutions seemed like they made some leaps, and players were just supposed to make some assumptions, even though there wasn’t heavy evidence to lead them there. So there was some confusion at the conclusion of some cases

Final Thoughts

Listen, I’m probably just a terrible detective, but that’s okay, I won’t quit my day job. Still, even with being bad at the cases at times, I still thought the game was a lot of fun. I like this system of reading through the mysteries, trying to solve the case, and going over all the details you find, trying to make connections. The experience with a group of 2, or maybe 3, is great.

If you like Chronicles of Crime (which I do, a lot) but you don’t love the tediousness of scanning cards with the app, then you’ll probably love this because it removes that layer of it.

Overall, a great deduction/whodunit game for a small group, or a solo player!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 8/10

Designers -Sebastien Duverger Nedellec,
Paul Halter, Guillaume Montiage
Artist – Émile Denis
Publisher – Studio H
MSRP – $29.99
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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