Detective Review
I sit down to write my review of Detective. It’s a cold, grey autumn day, but my flat is well insulated. I look at the empty screen in front of me. The cursor blinks. Impatiently awaiting input. Nothing happens for some time. This shouldn’t be so hard. I need a break.
I go into the kitchen, still cluttered from last night’s dinner. I make myself a salad. And a coffee. I lean on the side and eat, staring into space. Thinking. Then my brain fires and an idea lands in front of me like a pager alarm. I know how to start this review! I rush back to the laptop and begin to type…
Players: 1-5
Time: 120-180 mins
Age: 16+
Designer: Przemysław Rymer, Ignacy Trzewiczek, Jakub Łapot
Artist: Aga Jakimiec, Ewa Kostorz, Rafał Szyma
Publisher: Portal Games
This review of Detective has been certified SPOILER FREE!
Detective is the exciting new investigation game from Portal Games (First Martians, Robinson Crusoe), a company who boldly claim the tagline “Board Games that Tell Stories”. You better bet we’ll be coming back around to examine that claim! In the meantime, what’s the story here, Detective?
You will be investigators in the newly formed Antares police division, a sort of FBI/police cross breed and your first case has just come in. It seems pretty dull at first: trace the history of an old watch that just appeared for auction. But this inauspicious start kicks over a can of worms that will wriggle on for all 5 cases of this police procedural boxed set.
Each case is represented by a deck of cards and some introductory text in the casebook. You’ll get some initial leads from the introduction, and then it’s up to you! Each lead points you to a specific, numbered, card from the deck. Choose to pursue it and you’ll draw that card, read the lashings of flavour text and perhaps get some valuable clues and, more than likely further leads. It feels and operates rather like a cross between TIME Stories and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. Except where TIME Stories has exciting panoramic vistas, and Sherlock has witty, delightful descriptions, Detective has some of the most tediously written flavour I have ever witnessed.
If the flavour text of this game was a sauce it would be a watery gravy. Technically it’s adding something to the experience, but you’re not sure that it wouldn’t be better without it. It is honestly a joke, one at the expensive of the idea of “board games that tell stories.” I can see what they are trying to do, capturing a snapshot of the day to day life of a cop on the job, the dry procedural nature of most tasks, the cheap, government funded environments. You can almost smell the bureaucracy. But I’m not playing Detective for salads and crap coffee anymore than I watched The Wire for the intricate details of report writing. I mean, except for that scene with the tide calculations… look, there’s a right way to do this and a wrong way and Detective completely missed the point: that what readers care about are characters and the case and if you’re not going to give us one, you had better give us the other!
It might not be so bad if there wasn’t so damn much of it. After the shock at reading out the first couple of cards you almost immediately give in to skimming through for anything important and focussing on that. This is made even more frustrating by the skill token mechanic. See, you’re only allowed to read the top sides of cards but, if there is text on the rear, you might have to spend one of your limited selection of skill tokens to ‘dig deeper’ and read the reverse. Say you’re interviewing a suspect, you might spend an interrogation skill token to push them harder if you suspect they’re hiding something. The problem comes when most of the valuable information is locked behind these skill gates, so that you are forced to read through entire cards worth of fluff only to be told to read another card or to spend a skill token to actually get the info this lead has available. Why are you punishing me like this game!?
The situation is kind of ludicrous in the first case or two but as the campaign goes on it becomes less and less of an issue as the amount of stuff happening ramps up and the game’s real story kicks in. The skill token system is, sadly, still a little naff. It’s a decision that often (though not always) lacks context. We definitely leaned into spending often as we felt it was more likely you’d find something than nothing, and the only cost is in hypothetical future skill tests. That, combined with the little player powers, are very gamey mechanisms that ultimately serve as gates on what routes players will take through the case.
The Twist
The thing is though… none of those issues matter one jot. Detective is absolutely fantastic in all the ways that truly matter. The overarching mystery is deep, complex. A multitude of strands interweaving that you slowly pick apart over 5 well constructed cases that stand up on their own merits and contribute meaningfully to the overall narrative. Here, on the grand scale, is where we have a “Board game that tells stories.”
Detective also makes heavy use of an app which, far from just being a bookkeeping convenience, is used to increase your immersion to incredible effect. Entering in the codes of forensic evidence and watching it search for matches feels fantastic. Crawling through person of interest files to cross reference details from witness statements and old police reports is fantastic. I may not watch The Wire for paperwork but doing it myself in the service of solving a greater puzzle is genuinely great and, even better, makes you feel like a dedicated police officer, crossing the i’s and dotting t’s. Or whatever it is they do. This is a game about doggedly following leads and piecing together the evidence, more than it is about making leaps of deductive reasoning, exactly as it should be for this setting.
The decision to include extra real world elements was a fascinating one. Various elements will be marked with a WiFi symbol to indicate you can find something relevant by googling it. From historical events to real world locations around the city of Richmond. There have been few things in board games this year as cool as dropping down into street view to get a look at a real world area for a case you’re trying to solve in game.
If I’m being nitpicky I would say that these elements might be a bit gimmicky. Or that they were forced to use the Wi-Fi symbol to stop players googling everything and realising how made up other elements, even street layouts at certain points, are. But this is what astonished me about this game. For all its faults, the central experience is so brilliantly put together, so compelling in its story and mystery, and so wonderfully immersive that even issues as annoying to me as the flavour text – an issue that would normally have been game-defining for me – fell into the background.
Detective is absolutely getting the highest of recommendations from me. My wife and I played this together, and we don’t play games super often. We played Detective 5 evenings back to back to completely finish it! That is how much we both enjoyed it.
Now, the structure of this game will make it harder to play for some of you so, fair warning. You obviously need the app and an internet connection and I’d honestly recommend a laptop or desktop for all the typing (plus it just feels even more immersive that way!) The campaign structure means you will need a dedicated group and, due to how interlinked the cases are, you will want to play these pretty soon after one another. Even playing each case one night after the next I struggled to keep track of everything. Good note taking is a must! But if you are able to make it work around these challenges I wholeheartedly recommend getting stuck in!
Rating: Best Detective
Our copy of Detective was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £45.00 RRP from your local hobby store.
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