WARNING: I don’t do spoiler-free reviews. If you want spoiler-free, this is not the blog for you.
Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game adds a lot to Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective‘s investigative formula and gains very little. Loaded with unnecessary mechanics, unintuitive gimmicks, and uninteresting text, you’d think the game would be a total failure, but fortunately that is not the case. On the contrary, it’s actually quite immersive! What we have here is a game with a very effective core system needlessly surrounded by a surplus of ideas, many of which don’t really work. Regardless, Detective remains a suspenseful and information-dense investigation game that challenges and excites at least more often than it confuses and disappoints.
In Detective, 1-5 players take on the roles of agents for Antares, a nascent criminal investigation organization under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Antares is ostensibly “the most high-tech investigation agency in the world,” but sadly that idea does not mechanically manifest itself in any meaningful way. Yes, a good portion of the game is accessed via a dedicated website. No, that does not make it cutting edge — at least not any more than VHS games were cutting edge in the early 90s. Anyway, like Sherlock before it, the vast majority of playing Detective is choosing what to do from a list of available leads then reading a bunch of text describing what happens. Sometimes the text is on cards and sometimes the text is on the aforementioned website. Either way, I hope you like reading text, because boy does this game have a lot of it. Before starting a case, players are assigned characters with a stock of “Skill Tokens” and a unique special ability. Skill tokens can be spent during certain leads to gain access to otherwise gated information, and abilities provide additional options that help you manage your time and resources. Most abilities cost “Authority Tokens” to use, which represent how much sway you have with your superiors. Also, much like skill tokens, authority can be used to access off-limits information. You start with a set amount at the beginning of each case and earn more by investigating promising leads. While largely inconsequential, both the character abilities and token economy function as a way to throw some light decision-making into the investigation process beyond the standard “Which lead do we follow next?”. Other elements players must take into consideration are their time and stress limits. Cases in Detective must be solved within a certain number of days, each starting at 8am and going until 4pm with “Overtime” starting at 5pm. Every lead you follow in the game costs hours out of your day and each hour you push into overtime adds a point of stress towards your limit. Cases typically end when your time limit is up, but mismanagement of your team’s stress can theoretically force your investigation to end early (though you’d have to be pretty air-headed for this to actually happen). However it ends, after it’s complete you are quizzed by your superiors regarding your findings and given a score, both a point amount and also the designation of a pass or fail. As far as the game’s structure goes, there are no turns, and the division of labor is left entirely open for the players to decide. There are some helpful suggestions in the manual on how to split up tasks, but how strictly you follow them is really up to you and your team of agents.
Something you’ll notice immediately about Detective is its obnoxious writing style. Paragraphs and paragraphs drone on with dry, superfluous descriptions of coffee and food breaks, registration processes, explanations of basic technology, and efforts to make Antares sound cool. It’s a comically overdone attempt at capturing the grave tone of a police procedural that led to many an eye roll during my time with it. On top of that, the game’s plot is not particularly interesting either. Ironically, a game billing itself as a “Modern Crime Board Game” mostly has you digging up information about World War II veterans and decades-old murder cases. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, and I suppose a revenge tale of corporate intrigue half a century in the making is a unique topic for a board game to tackle, but it does render the majority of the story points in the game rather lifeless. At least the plot is functional, as its chronological expanse allows for a wide variety of past and current events to intermingle in a way that feels complex, but not overwhelming. This is highly important, because the sheer density of information in Detective and the mental exercise required to wade through it is equal parts stimulating and exhausting. On one hand, the abundance of details to analyze and comb through makes for a highly immersive experience, effectively tricking your brain into thinking these were genuine historic events that actually happened (a feeling reinforced by a healthy dose of actual history occurring tangentially to the game’s story). This realism comes at a cost, however, and playing the game tends to feel more than a little like work. Enjoyable and rewarding work thankfully, but work nevertheless. And while there are a few immersion-breaking moments to be found — information not 100% lining up between cases and leads and so forth — Detective is largely successful in spinning a believable web of information (and misinformation) to get caught up in.
Where Detective is not so successful is in its attempts to integrate more traditional board game concepts, such as variable player powers and resource management, into the investigation experience. Some ideas work well enough: the inclusion of a time limit makes a lot of sense and adds weight to the decisions on which leads to pursue, the stress limit is a light risk/reward mechanism with an appropriate thematic grounding, and authority tokens are a non-invasive way to inform players they are on the right path while opening up options later on. It would’ve been nice if these concepts were woven more organically into the players’ choices (events changing depending on the time of day you perform them or how well-rested you are, for example), but as is they get the job done just fine and strike a respectable middle ground between wholesale abstraction and narrative agency. The character abilities and skill tokens, however, add absolutely nothing of value, and adversely impact the game’s meta by frequently moving the table conversation away from the investigation and toward assorted cardboard rectangles and circles. The “Dig Deeper” mechanism, which allows you to exchange a skill token for more information on a lead, could easily just eat into your time limit instead, and all the character abilities do is manage your supply of authority and skill tokens without even an attempt at thematically defining them — how typically Euro. Unfortunately, the overzealousness of the designers does not stop with shoehorned mechanics, and they elected to cram all sorts of crummy gimmicks into a couple of the cases in the game. The worst of the offenders is, of course, the infamous third case which is so overloaded with unintuitive ideas and mechanical switch-ups that it feels like a completely different game. You can practically hear Detective‘s core system bending and straining under the weight of them, and their subversion of previously established concepts, unclear instructions, and awkward implementations are a guaranteed recipe for a frustrating game night if ever there was one. I’m honestly surprised the case made it through play testing in its current form.
Detective clearly had ambitions to be much more than it is, but it fails to live up to them. Take for example the website a good portion of the game is played on: apart from a single instance of an embedded YouTube video (not counting those garbage case recaps) pretty much all you do on it is read text and look at pictures — things that could just as easily be printed on cards. Sure, it gives you a convenient list of character profiles (complete with a cornucopia of headshots from struggling actors) and an automated evidence matching database, but at no point does it feel like a crucial component of the game’s design. When I first started Detective I thought I was going to be hacking into systems, cracking passwords, finding ways to cleverly dig up information on suspects, etc., but the reality is you can only look up specific information and only specifically when the game tells you to. It’s restrictive to the point of meaninglessness, relegating an exciting idea to a sadly shallow novelty.
The same notes of unfulfilled potential and unfocused design echo all throughout Detective, but that is not to say it’s an altogether unsatisfying experience. Weaving disparate strands of collected information into cogent theories that direct your progress is fun and rewarding due to the game not holding your hand or treating you like a dumdum. While the multiple choice question finales of the cases are all pretty anticlimactic (why not have you type in the answers, so you’re not weirdly privy to conclusions you didn’t make?), the journeys to arrive at their answers are anything but. It’s a shame that in a lot of ways Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game is the yin to Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective‘s design philosophy yang, and that where Sherlock reduces and simplifies Detective expands and complicates. With some mechanical trimming, perhaps a writer with a little more personality, and more of a focus on in-the-moment narrative tension and less on disruptive gimmicks Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game could have been a truly top of the line crime-solving experience.
Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.