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…