Welcome back to Cooperative Adventure Month! Last week, we took a look at the “Adventure In a Box“: Starlings! This week, we take a look at the expansion Saints and Sinners for the wonderful cooperative (and more) Detective: City of Angels! This expansion offers more mystery, adventure, and discovery with more cases in the seedy world of noir LA!
Detective: Saints and Sinners was on Gamefound back in May 2023. This is an expansion for the wonderful game Detective: City of Angels (not to be confused with Detective series from CGE which is a very different set of games). Detective: City of Angels is a mystery solving game for 1-5 players (1-4 if playing cooperatively), with age rating 14+ and games taking anywhere from 30 minutes to 150 minutes, depending on the case and the number of players. We love this game so much, it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019! It also made our Top 10 Cooperative Detective and Mystery Games!
There are multiple ways to play Detective: City of Angels, but we prefer the cooperative way (aka Sleuth mode): See our review here for more discussion of the game and different ways to play.
This expansion arrived at my house late January 2024. Saints and Sinners is a “new content” expansion for Detective: City of Angels: it’s a bunch of new mysteries to solve! Since Detective: City of Angels cases are “play-once” entities (once you know the solution, it doesn’t make sense to play it again), expansions like this are the way to keep the game invigorated!
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing
This is a box full of either 2 or 3 cases for the Detective: City of Angels game.
Those of you paying attention may have noticed the little red sticker on the top right of the cover. That’s right! My version doesn’t contain the “Clock and Daggered” case cards? I only have two cases in my box!! What’s going on?
It turns out Detective: City of Angels tried a different way of marketing new cases: one case at a time … and I guess it didn’t do very well. So, Saints and Sinners is an expansion is packing of 3 cases into one purchase. We actually did buy the single case Cloak & Daggered blister pack! See above! In fact, Cloak & Daggered made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions back in 2021!
And for those people who HAD bought the Cloak & Daggered pack, Gamefound allowed you to back Saints and Sinners with only two cases, so you wouldn’t buy the same case again!
The box comes with only what you need for new cases: A new Chisel book for the 2/3 cases, A new Sleuth book for cooperative mode, 4 new briefing notes, boxes containing cards for each case, matrices for entries lookups, and finally the standees.
Weirdly, the standees are very inconsistent: the first five standees are obviously Vincent Dutrait art, the next five are a different style, and the last 5 are an even different style! This is very jarring as previous standees have been Vincent Dutrait art!
However, I am here for the mysteries, so the mixing of art styles isn’t that big a deal. It’s the stories and mysteries that matter!
Solo Play
To play solo or cooperatively, you have to play Sleuth mode: see an excerpt from the main rulebook above.
Luckily, this new expansion supports the solo and cooperative modes: it comes with both the Sleuth book (see above) and matrix cards you need in order to play these mysteries solo/cooperatively! (In other words, they didn’t just support the main game in Classic mode: they supported all modes!)
If you know how to play Detective: City of Angels, you can just jump right in to this expansion. There are no new “mechanics” added to the game: it’s just new cases! So, I jumped right in, solo, for the first case (for me), One Last Hit For the Hit Man!
Solo mode works great! I went around the board trying to figure out when to choose moving to new locations vs searching locations vs questioning people! I only had a limited numbers of actions, and I had to make the best of them! The mysteries are very much non-linear: sometimes you question a suspect and they reveal something that you need … which means you have to move back to question someone you’ve already interrogated previously!
I had this little monologue going in my head that sounded like a bad noir narrator:
“I figured, while I was on this side of town, I’d question the dames. I couldn’t get anything out of Laney, but at least Brenda was just a short stop away. At some point, I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and slough myself across town to the murder scene. It’s quite inconvenient that the murder scene was so far away. But I guess it was a lot more inconvenient for the corpse.
I’ve said this already in my reviews of Suspects (see here and here): Why watch a murder mystery on TV when you can be part of one? This new expansion is like a new season of your favorite noir detective show! It still works great as a solo game.
Cooperative Play
I was a little nervous playing the next game in the pack: Blast From the Past is labelled as a Veteran level case!
Sara is a new gamer to our group: she hasn’t played quite as many modern board games, so I was afraid it would be too much.
I don’t know why I worried: Sara handled it like a pro. We had a fantastic time playing this case cooperatively! It seemed a little easier than we expected, but maybe we just made some really good hits at the start of the game.
Overall, this still plays great cooperatively and this was a really fun case with interesting turns.
Conclusion
If you have finished all the cases for Detective: City of Angels, Van Ryder games has your back! Saints and Sinners offers more cases in this noir world, and they are just as good as the original! Of course, if you are still working through the original 12 cases in Detective: City of Angels, this expansion may seem silly.
Think of Saints and Sinners as a new season of your favorite Detective show. You haven’t gotten around to watching all the seasons yet, but just knowing that there are more seasons of the show is heartening, since that demonstrates that people are liking this! This show must be good if there are so many seasons!
- Detective: City of Angels original cases (Season 1)
- Smoke And Mirrors (Season 2)
- Bullets Over Hollywood (Season 3)
- One-off Standalone Special: Cloak & Daggered!
- Saints and Sinners (Season 4: one episode was teased as a standalone)
Of course, this must be British TV since later seasons only have 3 or 4 episodes each …
coopgestalt 