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…
Greenland is an interesting game to discuss. Did I say game? I meant simulation. As a game, it’s much less interesting. I know, I know, that’s just about the most common criticism you can toss at an Eklund design, but it’s a common criticism for a reason. In Greenland‘s particular case, it’s because the game was obviously created first and foremost as an abstract mechanical approximation of the historical events it depicts. But, as a tabletop gaming experience, it struggles to even function. Everything from the overarching game structure, to the flow of a round, to each individual player action is maximally obtuse and filled with all manners of exceptions, edge-cases, and randomizations. Thing is, contrary to most other games plagued by issues such as these, it is perfectly apparent that in Greenland this is intentional. A cursory glance at the ridiculous rulebook for the game betrays this immediately. The deliberateness behind each rule is obvious, but damn there are so many. Eklund, visionary that he is, has tried to include as many aspects and nuances of his chosen theme in the design as possible. In doing so, he has created a chaotic, claustrophobic mess of systems without a shred of attention paid to the game’s rhythm, decision space, or social interactions between players. Okay, maybe that’s not 100% true, but it’s certainly what it feels like. From a low resolution perspective, I can absolutely see the validity in implementing mechanics that are as representative of your theme as possible and making that your chief design…