Designed by: David Cicurel
Chronicles of Crime places you, the players, at the heart of Scotland Yard and presents you with a series of brutal cases to solve, unweaving the tangled webs of culprits, motives, evidence and red herrings to be eventually disregarded. Solve the crime to win the game – the basic box comes with five scenarios, but more can be purchased online and used with this ‘starter set’. You’ll also need the (free) app on your phone.
Everything in Chronicles of Crime is facilitated by the app. Each case involves locations, people, and evidence and all of these elements are represented by cards with QI codes. To travel to a location, scan the code. To talk to someone there – say, a gardener in Hyde Park – scan the code. Here’s where Chronicles of Crime is rather clever: to quiz them about their relationships with other people or knowledge of the case (eg evidence) whilst ‘talking’ to them, you scan the codes on the relevant cards, before eventually ‘saying goodbye’ to end the conversation. Initially it can be slightly confusing but the introductory case things takes you by the hand and leads you through the game’s logic, and things quickly fall into place. This ‘talk to’ logic is also applied to four police departments you can ‘call’ from any location – forensic scientist, doctor, criminologist and hacker.
The way each case is constructed establishes a narrative of sorts as interviewing suspects or finding evidence opens up more avenues of pursuit in the case, and as you rush around London the app also traces the game time you’re using, with interviews taking a few minutes but changes of locale rather longer. The app also offers the immersive (and somewhat grisly) virtual-reality experience of examining the crime scenes, complete with victims: this is not one for the kiddies.
As you connect the dots on the case you – hopefully – reach a juncture where you’re ready to solve it, and can submit your findings to your superior at Scotland Yard, either getting a score out of 100 for accuracy, or – if you’re way off base – having your ridiculous theories thrown out and being told to work the case a bit more.
None; as players you work co-operatively.
None - all players are active at all times.
The rules are simple. Chronicles' brain-burning is genuinely putting together the whys and wherefores of each case.
The scenarios aren't replayable, so if you've experienced them all it's probably time to pass the box on to someone else to have a go.
1-4
Players
18
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
I've bumped up the star rating here because there are things Chronicles of Crime does really well: immersive narrative, heads-up player discussion and teamwork, impressive moments (those crime scenes aren't just to show off a bit of VR but need to be studied) as well as genuine deduction. I applaud it for those things, but - full disclosure, I've only played three times - subjectively speaking I just found myself wondering why it's a board game rather than a computer game. It felt to me like the entire undertaking would function better with players using a tablet, and I'm not clear (beyond marketing decisions) what adding the cards and board really do for the experience other than add a huge amount of scanning QR codes: I feel other games have implemented use of on app not just better, but more necessarily. It seemed I was in a kind of supermarket of criminality as a result, so... this was a bit of a miss for me. But, that said, I have heard others rave about the game and their brilliant experiences of it so clearly I'm in the minority.