Detective - A Modern Crime Board Game

Feel like a real investigator

This is a cooperative (or solo) game in which participants will become agents of "Antares", a special office working under the auspices of the FBI. During the game, the participants have to unravel five complex cases thanks to the use of the Antares digital database on a special website, find the criminals and give the correct answers to the questions from the final survey. There are no dice checks or item carry quest challenges in this game. This is the concentrate of a detective, a police investigation as it is.

Feel like Rust Cole, Clarissa Starling or John Luther in a modern narrative detective game from the brilliant Polish game designer Ignatius Czewiczek, which won nearly two dozen awards and laid the foundation for an entire game system that contributed to the development of hybrid games with the use digital auxiliary tools. Among the games available in Ukraine under this system, PlayTale will also note the board "Dune: Secrets of the Houses", dedicated to the history of political intrigues on the desert planet of Arrakis.

System features

• Use of Companion Site. On the website https://antaresdatabase.com/ you will get additional information about the evidence and you will be able to read the files of the people involved in the case, read the plot text and at the same time not be afraid of accidentally coming across spoilers. In addition, the survey on the website at the end of the investigation will determine how close you are to solving the case.
• Five independent, yet interconnected cases. You will investigate these cases in sequence, and each of them will seem completely independent at first. Nevertheless, the destinies of the heroes will intertwine and form a common pattern that will guide you to solving the main mystery...
• Sixth additional case available on the PlayTale website. That`s right, with the Ukrainian localization you can also download the bonus case "Suburbs".
• Co-op or solo. All the agents in the game will have their own roles and monitor the personal aspect of the investigation, so the division of roles between the participants will allow everyone to feel involved in the work of Antares. And at the same time, you can take the entire burden of the investigation on yourself and try to solve the case on your own without joint discussions.
• Time limitations. Time in the game "Detective" is the most important resource. Excessive use of time will lead to fatigue of the agents, and at the same time, each action will require spending time: moving to the crime scene, investigating the file, interviewing witnesses or laboratory analysis of evidence... During the game, participants on average manage to reveal about 20 cards out of a possible 35, so your investigation will depend entirely on how you decide to spend your time together.

Gameplay

The game consists of five cases, each of which you will go through separately from each other, and at the end of the investigation you will take a survey about the conclusions you reached during the game. However, after completing the last case, you also have to complete a final survey that will test how well you were able to connect all the cases together to solve the main mystery of the game. That`s why PlayTale must warn that some seemingly useless evidence can be useful in the following cases: take notes and discuss the investigation!

Each investigation will be directed in a different direction: somewhere you will focus more on witnesses, somewhere on the dossier base, and somewhere on evidence. However, the investigation of each of the cases will have the following features:

1. Before the start of the game, the participants choose heroes with unique abilities. In addition to the abilities of their hero, each participant will also be responsible for his part of the investigation: someone will work with the database, someone will keep notes, etc.
2. At the beginning of the investigation, you take the envelope of the relevant case and open it. The envelope of each case in the game contains 35 cards. You will draw new cards from the deck as soon as you are instructed to do so. Sometimes you will also have a choice between several cards.
3. There are clues on the maps that you can explore and work on. Participants will search the Antares database by visiting https://antaresdatabase.com/ where the agency`s database of various protocols, dossiers and fingerprints is located. Sometimes you also have to write reports to get influence tokens. Certain actions may require influence tokens, skill tokens, or special agent abilities. The task of the detectives is to put together a picture of the crime before the time runs out.
4. The playing field shows the locations that the detective team will visit. Moving between locations also takes up detective time, and the field itself helps keep track of movement and remember all the possible locations available to visit.

Completion of investigation and final survey

Time in the game is limited. When performing actions or moving between locations, players waste time. Overtime hours lead to stress, just like in real life. Time passes quickly enough, so players will definitely not have time to sift through all the available information. That is why the direction of the investigation and the careful processing of information are extremely important.

When time runs out, or the number of stress tokens exceeds the allowable level, the game ends. Detectives go to the "Final Account" section on the Antares website, where they answer basic and additional questions. The site will inform you whether the case was successfully completed and will summarize the number of points earned.

No matter how successful you were in the previous case, you will still be able to take on the next one and still be able to complete the final survey after completing the fifth investigation, because the evidence from different sources can lead you to the solution of the main mystery and the right conclusions affairs.