Detective / investigation boardgames are really flooding on the market these days. Chronicles of Crime is another one. The gimmick is that much of the interfacing with the game happens through a smartphone app. Want to interrogate a character? Scan their QR code, and you’ll get some text to read out loud. Want to ask them about a specific item or person you’ve found during the investigation? Scan the QR code of that item while still in the discussion UI for that character. Etc.
There’s also a secondary bit of functionality in the app where, when visiting a new location, one player looks at the scene on the phone app (potentially in VR) and describes items of interest, other people try to find matching items from a deck of cards.
The primary upside of this app should be that it’ll let the scenario designer provide different responses depending on the information you have. And a smaller benefit is that there will be intermediate points in the story where the players prove that they’ve figured something out (by asking an astute question), not just the traditional “answer these five questions at the end of the case to prove you solved it” model.
Also, new cases can be sold as DLC to the phone app, no need for full board game expansions. All the physical components are generic (e.g. having a deck of 50 items and 50 persons), the story is completely in the app. But I don’t know that I really want to call it a “benefit”.
Unfortunately the execution just isn’t there. The amount of text you get for a single action is a couple of sentences. This makes the experience of playing the game just kind of slow and fragmented: there’s no chance for whoever is reading to even get into the narration before it’s cut short and you have to scan another QR code. And since the snippets are so short, there’s very little room for subtle hints. It’s just the most heavy-handed tripe imaginable. This is probably because the authors had to provide tons of filler text as answers to non-essential conversation branches, and couldn’t polish the parts that actually matter for the story.
The one scenario we played was just boring. There was none of that “we have no idea of what’s going on here or where to go next, so let’s toss around some ideas” discussions that’ll usually happen during Consulting Detective. It was just following up on the obvious clues one by one.
I doubt I’ll ever play a second scenario of this. But at least it solved the problem of the game giving static responses regardless of the players’ theoretical / actual knowledge of the case. My group has thought it was a real issue with the whole Consulting Detective-like genre. Now we know that the cure is probably worse than the disease.