Board Game: Detective

Put on some coffee, it's gonna be a long night. *lights cigarette*

The Game: Detective
The Publisher: Portal Games
Time: 3-ish hours
Players: Me, Emery, Tim, Kate, Michelle

Game Play: We didn't wind up playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians last night, so we wound up playing, like, the opposite of that, kinda. Detective is a cooperative campaign game in which you take on the roles of folks working for Antares, a specialist investigative agency under the FBI. (It was remarked, a couple of times during the setup, that we were tired of things being topical in the sense of "hey, this might not exist soon.")

Anyway, everyone has a character card, all the characters are specialists in some investigative field - journalist, analyst, PI, ex-cop, and so on. They all have special abilities, but the abilities are pretty flavorless (that is, they're useful in the context of the game but there's no easy way to explain them in the fiction). There are five cases included in the base game and there's another season available; this game isn't so much a legacy game (no stickers or rules changes, to my knowledge), but a campaign game in that the fiction changes as you play it.

CHRIS STONE - PI!

The game presents a case. Your boss gives you a briefing, and then you have a specific number of days in which to solve it. Each day is divided into eight hours, and various tasks cost hours of your day - traveling to a location costs an hour (Richmond PD, the Lab, Headquarters, Fieldwork [which is basically "everywhere else"]) and then the actual work can cost anything up to four hours. If you go past 4PM you can keep working, but every hour gives you stress, which affects your score at the end and can end the investigation prematurely if it gets above a set limit.

(As a side note, I've read John Douglas' book Mindhunter, in which he talks about the early days of Hoover's FBI and how Hoover wanted everyone to work overtime and be constantly working more than they did last week, meaning the only way to fill out your end-of-week reports was to lie like crazy, so it's amusing to me that this game presents a hard stop of an 8-hour work day but prevents you from pulling all-nighters. It's clearly written by Europeans.)

So, anyway, you can perform various actions to pursue the case. You can type names into the Antares Database (a real live website for the game), sometimes you get a symbol to search something on the plain ol' internet, but the real fun is the cards. Every case has a deck of cards, and the cards often present a novella's worth of text that explains what your characters do, the coffee they drink, the chairs they sit in, and, oh yeah, what relevant info they find. 

 Michelle and Kate diligently taking notes

From there, you decide what leads to follow and try to synthesize all the data and solve the case. At the end of your time limit (or if you hit your stress cap), you go to the end-of-case bit of the website and take the post-quiz to see if you solved it.

Emery is a master of disguise! 

Opinions: I'm being somewhat snarky, but I actually really enjoyed the game. Let's start with my criticisms: The prose on the cards is a little overwritten and since the game is such a cognitive load, I did find myself thinking "please get to the fucking point" more than once. Also, all of the investigators move as a unit, which makes sense mechanically, but in the fiction it's weird that we can't split our efforts and maximize our time a little (and led to jokes about how the five of us all inhabited one body or were some kind of amorphous blob thing).

But once you understand the mechanics, they're not hard to use. The abilities that the characters have all revolve around maximizing time; digging deeper into leads requires Skill tokens, but you only get so many of the different types. Michelle's character could swap out Authority tokens (which you get for being on the right track, among other things) for a "wild" Skill, for example. The mechanics nicely get out of the way and let the players dig into the meat of solving the case, which is the point. And it was gratifying to watch the story come together. 

In the end, we solved the case, but didn't get the maximum score not because we missed something, but because we forgot a detail that had been presented right up front in the briefing. The case was also rife with information that probably won't be relevant until later in the campaign, so I hope we get to play it at some point!

Keep? Definitely.