Lucky Duck Games | Chronicles of Crime | Board Game | Ages 14+ | 1-4 Players | 60-90 Minute Playing Time

Product Information

Chronicles of Crime does have a fantastic cooperative nature, and there is usually a lot of discussion about who to talk to, and if they’re lying (characters lie). One player can keep the phone, and control everything, but as each player has a go investigating the 360 images and also the map spreads out with location cards around the table, it’s easier to pass the device running the app around and have discussions about the next steps.

Using the same set of physical components (a board and cards representing locations, characters, and items), the Chronicles of Crime app lets you and your friends step into a world of mystery and play out your investigations. With two, you can easily discuss and share the app and clues. You each have a role, a job, a purpose. With three? You can put heads together whilst someone interrogates the innocent and scans every code available. It’ll be a good balance of thoughts and approaches, with enough hands and heads to work out the nitty-gritty of the many details of the cases. Four is the maximum I’d suggest for this game. It works well, but everyone needs to know the basics of the game to avoid clashes of ideas. More people will just break the game apart and it’ll become a convoluted mess or develop overly complicated ideas and not enough apps to go around. For us, two works perfectly and it’s a superb amount of fun.Chronicles of Crime manages to deliver a tense, puzzle-solving-filled experience that thoroughly tests your deduction skills. The blending of physical components and digital media has been achieved with perfection, setting an exemplary example for future puzzle and detective games to come. Chronicles of Crime is super easy to set-up; you put out the various components, most of which have a QR code on them, turn on the app and start the tutorial. If you have splashed out on the VR module as well, you’ll need to keep that handy too. The VR module looks like a small set of glasses but clips on to a normal side phone nice and snugly. During the investigation, players will also discover new locations, and place the location display board in play. They can then scan the location QR code to travel to that destination, and talk to the characters there. Discovered characters are placed on locations, and undiscovered characters are placed on a central clue board until they’re found. Characters, like items and locations, are scanned when you want to interact with them. They can then be questions about other characters and items you have discovered. In Chronicles of Crime 1400 players start off with a blank board, and populate it, along with the location boards as they investigate.

None of this information is written on the cards themselves, but contained within the app. Players activate it by scanning a QR code on the relevant card. This works brilliantly. It allows the game to reuse the same character cards in different scenarios as all the relevant information to the current crime mystery is stored in the app. This expands the replayability of the game, relying on the addition of new digital content rather than players buying physical components. It is, of course, inevitable that expansions will add more cards or locations to the game. However, as there is plenty of physical content already, some new extra expansions could focus on digital content only, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy. Loading up the app for the first time takes you into a simple tutorial case, but don’t be fooled; subsequent cases up the ante and subtlety significantly. Cases will involve you being called to a scene which you can generally examine using the app. This can be done with the separate VR Module attached to your phone, or just through the phone's display. If you are playing with friends you will be frantically be shouting out all the things you see as they rifle through the clue cards to find something that might relate. And it’s amazing when a character from a Vision from the start of the game suddenly shows up and you know there is a connection but you still have to find out which pieces of evidence will get them to tell you. ReplayabilityAt the start of a game, you choose in the app which case you want to play. During a short introduction, you will hear about an important character or two, and a location where you can start your investigation. includes one tutorial case and four full-length cases of difficulties from Easy to Hard. They usually take 1-2 hours to complete, meaning that the game has about 6.5 hours of gameplay in it from start to finish.