Chronicles of Crime – Welcome to Redview

• Designer: David Cicurel, Ghislain Masson
• Publisher: Lucky Duck Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 60-90 minutes per case

Chronicles of Crime is a cooperative game of crime investigation, mixing an app, a board game and a touch of Virtual Reality.  With the same physical components (board, locations, characters and items), players will be able to play plenty of different scenarios and solve as many different crime stories.

Some strange things have started to happen in the small town of Redview. For weeks now, animals have been disappearing. When Wookie, Sheriff’s dog, disappears as well, 6 friends get together to try to find him.

Welcome to Redview is family friendly. No murders, but instead strange things are happening in a small town in Maine, USA, in the 80s. Since you play the role of kids, there are no scientific contacts you can call to help you. Instead, you will need to use your strength, agility and wit to get to your objectives!

As you play the game, there is an evidence board on the table.  You will lay cards out here when instructed by the app – these people/things/places on these cards represent important clues in your investigation.  There are also Location boards – each coded with a Letter.  Each of these will represent a different location important to your search.  

You will also have a deck of Character cards – each is numbered for easy identification and location.  As you play multiple cases, you might use the same card again, and oftentimes it will be a new person – with a story specific for that case.  Interestingly, there are also some cases which are tied together thematically, and you might actually run into the same person as you did in a previous investigation!    Characters may be found at specific locations, and they will interact with you differently based on where/when you find them.

In this expansion, there is also a bit of a RPG feel as you each take on the identity of a member of a high school gang of budding sleuths.  You have ability ratings in Fitness, Speech and Mind – and throughout these cases, you’ll be able to choose skill checks in these three different areas.  Success is determined by a high die roll, and there are ways to modify your rolls or re-roll as needed.

The game itself is super intuitive and uses the app heavily.  You choose the scenario you want to play, and you follow any setup instructions it might have.  Then, most everything is done with the app and the QR codes found on the clues, locations, items and characters, etc.  

The app is really well done, and it is cool to see how it deals with cards in different situations.  For instance, you might go to a location and search for clues; you will scan clue cards in and the app will tell you if they are significant to your investigation or not.  Later, you might scan a character card and start a conversation with them.   Now, if you scan the clue card, it will prompt a question about that item to the character you are talking to.  

Each time you do something, the time on the clock moves forward.  Asking questions, searching around, moving between locations, etc – each has a time cost associated with it.  Your overall score is determined in part by how long your investigation took.  Some scenarios may have a hard time limit in which you must solve the case.

Whenever you get to the end of the case, you go to the solution section of the app where you then answer a few questions about the case to see how well you learned the facts.  As you would suspect, you scan in cards that support your answers to the questions. 

My thoughts on the game

So, it’s not often that I’m reviewing a game from six years ago, but I honestly just played the base game for the first time a few months ago.  The main reason why I had never played the game is that I had a very strong dislike of games that use apps when they first came out.  Though I’m still not sold on the app integration, I am warming to the idea.  Many gamers have told me that the app implementation of this game is amongst the best in the genre, so it seemed like a great place to start.

This expansion adds an interesting twist with the RPG-like feel to it.  The group has some extra things to consider as it tries to solve the cases.  Certain points in the investigation hinge on passing skill checks.   There are usually two options presented.  As an example (which I just made up) – your team finds a locked box.  You can try to use a hammer to smash it open (easy – Fitness) or fiddle with a paperclip to pick the lock (hard – Mind).  A possible resolution of smashing might be that you get one piece of evidence but the other two things were crushed to dust… but if you had succeeded in picking the lock, you’d get all three things to review.

Harder challenges come with negative die roll modifiers, but also come with commensurate increases in the value of the knowledge obtained.  Each player has different skill ratings, and increased skill leads to more dice rolled against the challenge – and thus a higher chance for success.  Success is determined by a number of 5+ rolls equal to the number of players.  If you can get a roll of 7, you get a super-success worth 2.  I liked the way that it didn’t matter which player got those rolls, so we might have a particularly skilled player use their re-rolls on challenges where they had a better chance of getting the 5+ results that we needed.

As with the base game, the app is pretty great and does a really nice job of acting as the mediator of the game.  It keeps track of everything that you know and have seen, and I suspect that it doles out information only in ways that make sense.  For instance, since it is an app (and not a fixed page in a book), you’ll find characters at home or work during the day and then maybe at the pub at night.  Certain locations will be closed depending on the time shown in the app.  You really can’t find facts out of order or by mistake – things make a lot more sense in the world of Chronicles of Crime.  And… It’s super easy to ask questions or look at things – just scan the cards and the app does the rest.

Overall, the stories which I have experienced so far have been pretty detailed and, more importantly, the stories make sense.  Unlike some other detective games (Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective – I’m looking right at you), there are no impossible mental leaps needed to solve the case.  Talk to the right people, ask the right questions, and everything will fall neatly into place.

There is plenty of room for discussion amongst the group – you can talk about the facts that you’ve learned and develop your theories about what happened.  You can also talk out how you want to proceed next – in this expansion, we spent a lot of time debating which type of skill check to proceed with, taking into account our relative abilities as well as our current re-roll situation.  As each action in the app eats up your precious minutes; if you’re trying for the best score, you’ll need to make sure not to waste time doing unnecessary things.  That being said, I like the way that many cases also give you the freedom to poke around pretty much anywhere you want and ask anything to anyone that you come across.

The four cases here are linked together in a mini-campaign, so there is some nice continuity between the cases.  That being said, this box probably works best with the same roster of gamers so that everyone is on equal footing in their shared experience of previous investigations in Redview.

Thus far, I still like what I’m seeing in these older cases, and I will now be keeping my eyes open for more current expansions in the series.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. 
• Not for me…