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Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview is the second expansion for the amazing cooperative detective game, Chronicles of Crime. In Welcome to Redview, you play as a group of teenagers in the 1980s, trying to figure out why strange things are happening in your small town.
Chronicles Of Crime
Chronicles of Crime is the award-winning surprise hit from Lucky Duck Games. It is a detective game set in modern-day London, which uses an app and QR codes as well a VR module (a separate item you can buy, which I very much recommend). Chronicles of Crime is a heavy narrative game with relatively few components. You will discover evidence throughout the game in the form of cards.
Characters are also shown in the form of cards, which can range from suspects to others will who aid you along your investigations. All of these cards have scannable QR codes which let you gather evidence or engage with characters.
The app is mostly brilliant. It keeps everything immersive, even with the lack of components. The stories are very interactive and can range from easy to extremely challenging, making each case unique. To do all this, you simply scan a location, character or item. This is your means to interview suspects and present evidence. You scan a character and then scan the item or other character; this prompts the suspect to react. To move location, you simply hold the ‘scan’ button and move the phone over the location to move there. Everything is managed by time, which is reduced with each scan of a location or character.
The VR module is used in locations to discover evidence. This works really well and fits easily over your phone. You have a time limit in the module and you simply call out what you see, and your crime fighting partners find the evidence card that closely fits the item described.
This continues in the new Welcome to Redview expansion, which takes place in small town in Maine in the 1980s. It adds new mechanisms, characters and mysteries to uncover.
Welcome To Redview Gameplay
The cases in Welcome to Redview are very different to the other Chronicles of Crime cases that you may have played so far. In Welcome to Redview, each player gets to play as their own character. Each of these characters has three skills: Fitness, Speech, and Mind. This is all still done using the app and scanning QR codes to gather clues and interrogate suspects. The biggest change to the game other than theme is the added use of dice.
When you perform a test, you will roll your die and add your stat to the roll. You are all working as a team, hoping to roll successes equal to the number of players. Each character is also given energy tokens, which they can use to reroll – trust me, you will come to rely on these. Luckily, you will regain your energy tokens with each day that passes in the game.
As I mentioned, you play as teenagers, which means you will need to be home by a certain time each night. This makes things interesting, as you only have a certain amount of time to do everything you need to accomplish before the night is through. If you do get back late, you will lose points. The main problem I found is that you might be in the middle of something that you will have to end fast or be willing to lose points.
Other than the actions and the theme, the game plays identically to the base game. Search for clues, gather evidence, interact with potential suspects, and figure out what strange things are happening in your town before time runs out. The clever app-to-board-game integration still works amazingly well here.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview isn’t quite as good as the first expansion, Noir. However, I will say that one thing this expansion does really well is giving players more input in the game, due to each person having their own character. I would still say that this is a must-have for lovers of Chronicles of Crime. I love the theme here; it’s got a very Stranger Things vibe and I love the new characters and art. Don’t be put off by the lack of replayability or the lack of fancy components; this is all app-driven and adds to the real immersion of this game.
