We Detectives

Sometimes it seems like the kid's section of Barnes & Noble has some of the most fun games.  Sure, most of them seem a little too young, but we have found quite a few winners over there, including Cat Crimes, which I think was the very first one I wrote about in this blog series.

Today we tested out We Detectives, which was fun to unbox and pop out all the little pieces.  While it's not one of the "most fun" games ever, it was cure and entertaining, with a few things (as usual) open to interpretation the first time around but making more sense the next time.

There are diamond-shaped location tiles with go on the Location spaces on the board, so those are in different places each time.  Then a dozen evidence tiles which show the items you need to find.  As you find them, you put your pieces into the middle part of the game board and the first player to find all their pieces wins.  

Game play is driven by the stack of "WePhone" cards, which represent incoming text messages.  The story says you have 24 hours to solve the crime and there are 24 of these cards.  Anyway, pick a card and do what it says.  Usually, move 5 spaces or move 10 spaces, but other cards put down a hazard chip on a location and tell you where to go to clear the hazard (so for a fire you stop at the fire station to clear it), and a few cards say to meet at the Cafe.  Some cards say to put some evidence tile back into play ("wrong sack of cash", "judge is missing" and "sporty suspect is missing") which we were confused by our first time through, but we worked it out.

What's funny is that the default move is 5 spaces unless the card says otherwise, so why print cards that say "Everything is fine, move 5 spaces"?  Really, why?  They couldn't pick 4 or 6 or 7 spaces instead to make the cards have an actual purpose?

Anyway, it was pretty quick finding the people and objects we needed to find, though you had to go to the location where those things were shown in tiny tiny forms in the artwork.  Our big funk was that we thought you had to immediately go to the fire station (etc) to remove each hazard, and twice we were just a space or two away from one of our goals only to get dragged off to the far side of the board this way.  

It turns out, the rules say it is not required to clear the hazards to win the game.  Which leads to a strange alternate world where you just let buildings burn and dogs attack the hospital unless you have some personal gain from fixing them.  So it's a messed-up dystopian little town of hazards every few spaces while you just juke around the messes to pick up the old lady at the park.  I'm not sure that version is any better than our mistaken world where we were compelled to do our civic duty each time a hazard comes up.  But, due to the number of hazards in that tiny deck that the ignore-them-all version must be the correct way out.  We could not finish the first two games before the deck of 24 cards ran out (civic duty version) but with the "let it burn" mindset, we found our stuff and won the game with about 7 cards left.

Amusing, but it would probably get dull after another 5 or 6 times around the board.  Maybe we can think up some alternate rules to add replayability.  Or play it as cooperative and stab your partner in the back at the last minute for a personal win.  Perfect for the age group of 7+ though, or for two teams of two working together.

I do want to point out that the board itself never really unfolded flat and the stands for the player pieces were almost too tight to fit the pieces at all, so there was a somewhat cheap feeling.  But the WePhone cards were extra thick tiles and the rest of the pieces were solid.