Detective: City of Angels

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

The setting is Los Angeles of the 1940's. You are detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department. This is an age when police detectives are pretty much like licensed gangsters. You get to extort money from the real gangsters. Every scenario you play is one case. You need to solve the case within a time limit, after which the trail goes cold and the case is never solved. It is a race among the detectives to solve the case. During the course of the game, you only get one chance to solve the case. If you fail, you still continue to play, but you will need to wait until time runs out before you get another chance to solve the case. If no one solves the mystery when time runs out, everyone gets a second chance to solve the case. If everyone fails his second attempt, then the mastermind player wins the game. The mastermind player is the dungeon master. He sets up the game and knows the solution. He determines how the non-player characters (NPC's) behave when being questioned or body searched by the detective players. His objective is to prevent the detective players from solving the case.

Of course the hat is too big, it's not meant to be used this way. Hats are generic player markers. You use them to indicate who has seen which pieces of evidence, who has leverage on whom, etc.

The game board is a map of Los Angeles, divided into five regions. Moving between any two locations within the same region takes one action. Moving to an adjacent region usually takes two actions, the first one to move to a location at the border between the two regions, and the second one to get to your final destination.

The crime scene is marked with a red circle. In this photo it's the pier at location #99. During setup, the identities and locations of some of the key persons are already known, and the characters are placed at their locations. The row of cards at the top are the case cards. They can be persons (suspects / witnesses), murder weapons, or simply pieces of information. Some of these are already revealed during setup, some are face-down and need to be uncovered by the detectives during play.

These are the case cards of the first scenario. The first one is the murder victim, the next three are suspects, the rest are unknown.

You need to read a story before you start playing a scenario. This page tells you how to do setup and also specifies whether there are any special rules for the scenario.

Game components for the green player.

On your turn you get four actions. These four cubes help you remember how many you have taken, and what you have done. In addition to moving about, you get to question the key persons, body search them, and search locations. All these may yield new information. One important twist is what the key persons tell you may not be true. They may be outright lies. This can really throw you off. When you question a key person, other players may decide to employ snitches to eavesdrop. If they do, they will learn what you learn. The mastermind can sometimes prevent this, but you have no way of preventing it, other than doing questioning when everyone else is too poor to employ snitches. This snitch mechanism is important, because it makes investigation much more effective. It is nigh impossible to investigate everything yourself. You don't have enough turns or enough actions. You need to make use of snitches to gain information on other players' turns.

One of the things you can do is to visit businesses owned by gangsters, and extort money from them. This is likely something you'll often do. In fact it is so lucrative that you are limited to doing it only once per turn. You can't just camp at a nightclub and take all their hard earned money. You need money for many actions, like paying snitches. You can spend money on hooligans to rough up the people you are questioning. If they are trying to lie to you, this would force them to tell the truth. You'll also end up having leverage over them, because they are caught lying. On the other hand, if you rough them up when they are already telling you the truth, the mastermind gains leverage over you instead. So you do need to think twice before employing hooligans. Leverage is just a currency you can spend, e.g. to force someone to tell the truth during one particular session of questioning. The mastermind can use leverage to prevent a player from hiring a snitch.

Everyone gets one such record sheet. You use this to record information you have gained, and also your theories and deductions. Each row corresponds to a suspect whom you may question. Each column corresponds to a case card, which can be a person, a weapon or a piece of information. You can ask any suspect about any of the case cards, and this grid is for you to record who said what about which case card. Of course you can also use your own convention of taking notes.

The two sections at the bottom are for you to try to solve the case. To solve a case you need to write down the murderer, the weapon, and the motive. The solution usually includes a few motives, and you just need to get one right. If you correctly guess the murderer, the weapon and the motive, you win immediately. If you fail, the mastermind will tell you how many you get right. After that you continue to play, until someone else wins or time runs out. If time runs out, every detective gets a second chance to solve the case.

This section of the rulebook lists all the possible motives.

The setting is Los Angeles of the 1940's. Slang is used, and there is a glossary section to help you if you are not familiar with 1940's L.A.-speak. I would never have guessed cabbage means money.

Blue locations are police stations. You can visit police stations to get information about case cards already known by other detectives. Orange locations are gangsters' business. That's where you collect extortion money.

When you meet an NPC, you may question him and body search him. When you meet another detective, you may obtain information he knows. Sometimes detectives try to avoid one another because they don't want to share information.

Sometimes detectives claim evidence found and carry them with their persons. In such cases the detective's hat marker is placed here so that everyone knows who is carrying which piece of evidence. If a detective already knows about a particular piece of evidence, his marker is placed below the position of that piece of evidence.

This is the countdown track. You have a limited number of days to try to solve the case. One day is one round of play.

The Play

Essentially the game is a race to solve the case. There is tension between wanting to be fast, and wanting to collect enough information so that you can be more sure of your guess. If you are fast, but wrong, then you will be praying that the others get it wrong too. Your next opportunity is when time runs out and nobody has solved the case yet.

The game is all about collecting information, and piecing them together to form a story. Some information you collect is not very useful. Some is downright misleading. What stands out to me in this game is how some of the information may be lies. You need to immerse yourself in your role and in that world, so that you can judge who to trust and what to believe. On the whole it is better that the detectives investigate different people and locations. Collectively they would gather more information, and it would be easier to solve the case. However you are competitors and you don't really want to share information. Everyone wants to be the one questioning the right suspect and finding the right weapon. No one wants to go take the unlikely path for the sake of diversity or the common good. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as common good. This is not a cooperative game.

You need to have some imagination and creativity. You collect bits and pieces of information, and you try to assemble a likely story out of them. You put yourself in the shoes of that detective facing down the mafia boss, and you need to judge whether the guy is hiding something from you. You glean clues from the reactions of the NPC's. The actions of your fellow players will also give you hints. You need to watch what they are doing, even what they are not doing.

There is a limited number of possible murderers and murder weapons, so you can make use of the process of elimination to figure out the likely culprit and weapon. This is a little gamey. In real life, things would not be so simple. Solving a murder is not a multiple choice question. I guess this gamey aspect is unavoidable. Without some limit being implemented, the game may not be playable at all. The motives are a bit trickier. There are many of them so it feels more real.

The victim in the first scenario is a pretty girl.

"If the police detective career path doesn't work out I'm going to be a hat seller."

When all three detectives converge around these two characters, it is either they are the most likely suspects, or the detectives are trying to gain information from one another.

The red circle marks the crime scene.

The Thoughts

The most important twist in Detective: City of Angels is information you collect may turn out to be lies. You are not just weaving together scattered pieces of information, you also need to assess which pieces are true and which are false. There is good immersion because you need to put yourself into that situation at that time to be able to make judgements, and to imagine what might have actually happened.

Playing the mastermind is probably less fun. His role is to become part of the story and the experience for the detective players. In both games that we played, Ivan was the mastermind, so it was mostly him entertaining us. However he did play the first two scenarios himself beforehand using solo rules. When playing solo, you get to play detective, and the mastermind is a special rule set which governs how the NPC's behave.