Polski
English
Deutsch
It all started with my pure fascination for Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. I played it many times and absolutely adored the game. For the sake of the excellent story, I’d say it was after playing Sherlock when I created Detective. Cogs in my brain began to work, my designer DNA glitched, my internal secret power activated and out of the shadows, out of a mist, out of unknown there came something new. It was a game set in the modern times, with Detectives thrown into the brutal world of dark crimes.
The truth is obviously much more complicated.
***
Detective: modern crime board game is a cooperative, crime-solving game for 1-5 players. They take on the role of investigators working for the government agency ANTARES and try their hand at cracking the case. It’s a story-driven experience with five unique cases to solve. Cases are played as a dark, engaging campaign with unexpected plot twists and surprises along the story.
At its core Detective is a simple card game. Each investigation consists of 35 cards, with each card having its unique number. At the beginning of the Case, players get a couple of first leads – which means they get numbers of few cards and the game begins. They choose which card to draw, they read it, they deduce, they get new card numbers, the investigation unfolds.
It’s that simple. Read a card. Think. Analyze what you’ve learned. Decide which card you want to read next.
***
All reviewers keep mentioning the unique experience. The fact that they have never played a game like that. How you build an experience? How you suck the player into the story and make him forget the world around him? How we achieved that?
First of all, we hired an incredibly talented Polish writer to design and write the whole story. It’s engaging; it’s really original, it’s like a screenplay for a great TV show for Netflix or HBO. The moment players meet characters, discover first leads and clues, the story will suck them for good.
Then we built a dedicated website players can log in as if they worked for FBI or police. It stores the data for all characters in the campaign. Players can browse suspect folders, read transcripts from interrogation rooms, match fingerprints and DNA samples – they can do all the crazy stuff they saw when they were watching CSI TV shows. It works smooth and puts gameplay experience to the unseen level in board gaming yet.
And then we took another step and locked the whole story in a real word places and events and allowed players to use real-world tools like yahoo or google maps to cross-reference information or to check some additional facts. We called this mechanism ‘Breaking the 4th Wall” mechanism, and it’s making the experience insanely real. The moment when a player finds a name of the suspect on one of the cards, then log in to our police website and finds the transcript from interrogation, and then checks in yahoo one thing and finds out the dude was lying when was questioned… Goosebumps. That’s putting a game experience on the level never seen before.
***
Before it’s release, we run a series of exclusive demos for reviewers. The initial, first impression reviews were stunning. Scott Alden, CEO of BoardGameGeek said: “The big hit of the show for me was Detective.” The Dice Tower was very enthusiastic: “This is one immersive experience!” Jamey Keagy from Secret Cabal podcast said “Detective is the best mystery solving game I ever played. It beats all the other games, Sherlock Holmes, TIME Stories, all of them.” and Dan from the GameBoyGeek in his review released just before Gen con said: “This was my most anticipated game of the year. This is the rare case when not only it lived up to what I hoped it was, I think it possibly even exceeded my expectations.”
The game has a spectacular opening – more than 700 copies sold out at Gen con in less than two days, more than 12 thousand copies of the first print run sold in the first weeks from the release and 12 different local editions announced already with Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese and many others.
***
I cannot help but think it all probably started back then in 2015. I just finished watching the first season of True Detective, and I knew one thing for a fact. My next game is True Detective: the board game. A couple of years later I cannot express how proud I am of this game.
https://shop.portalgames.pl/detective-a-modern-crime-board-game
https://shopportalgames.com/collections/detective/products/detective-a-modern-crime-board-game
