Tag: detective

Detective-Heists and Heartbreak. A Solo and Cooperative Review of a new Expansion for Detective: City of Angels

Detective: Heists & Heartbreak is an expansion for the mystery board game Detective: City of Angels. This expansion was originally up on Gamefound as a pre-order December 2025. It pretty much delivered on time in early 2026.

Although the primary way to play Detective: City of Angels is as a 1-vs-many game (the chisel vs the detectives), that’s not the way we choose to play! The base game comes with a cooperative mode (built-in) where the detectives work together to solve the mystery of the week; we always play this cooperatively! And it works great!

There are three mysteries in this box that augment the original game!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The box is probably bigger than it needs to be; see Coke can above for scale.

There’s four case books (one for each player, up to 4 players cooperatively) which include the three new cases.

The Chisel book is included for the new cases … fun fact, you still need the Chisel book for the “final mystery summary” even if you are playing fully cooperatively! It replays the case and all the clues in a final “wrap-up”, kind of like what you expect in your favorite mystery shows like Death in Paradise, Midsomer Murders and other murder mystery shows.

For the cooperative game, there’s a sheet you use to indicate a passage to read … you are basically questioning suspects and witnesses about the murders and getting responses!

The Sleuth Casebook has all the entries for the grid: this is a storybook AND deduction AND mystery game! If you truly want a mystery like Death in Paradise, with all the interactions of witnesses and suspects, this is what you are looking for!

Using sheets from the original game, you make notes to yourself about what you saw and have to solve the mystery!

This expansion fits right in with the original vibe: it looks great! See above.

Case 1: A Twist of the Knife (Solo Play)

So, Detective: City of Angels has both a solo mode and cooperative built-in! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode for the game is a true solo mode: one player plays one detective, wandering around LA and questioning suspects, searching locations, and searching suspects!

The game balances itself by having 12 “days” to discover the solution, where each “day” is one player taking 4 actions. The solo player has it a little harder, because he has to travel all over the map by himself, but this is how the game balances for multiple players: the players (whether one or many) always gets 12 days with 4 actions per day, no matter how many players. The solo player gets all the actions, but the cooperative players have to divvy those actions between themselves.

I played the first mystery, A Twist of the Knife solo partly to remind myself how to play, and partly just because I love solving mysteries! I watch and read a LOT of mysteries, and I am always try to figure them out! And yes, I figured out the first mystery, but only after a second chance … if you fail to get the Motive, Weapon, and Reason within 12 days, you get a second chance … 3 more days …

The solo player is hamstrung a little on travel, because he’s only one detective having to wander all of LA to find things! That is balanced because the solo detective has the clarity of a single vision to push himself forward. It’s also a little harder on the solo player because he has to look up everything by himself! Look at the grid to find the entry, then find the entry in the Sleuth book, then read to himself! It’s not a terrible amount of work, but the game is more work for the solo gamer.

A Twist of the Knife worked great a solo game, and it reminded me why I love this system so much: I feel like a real detective solving a real mystery; I have to find the clues, do the hard work of questioning, follow my instincts, and make suppositions!

I will absolutely play Detective: City of Angels solo in any form. This new expansion fits right in.

Case 2: Hollywood Heartbreak (Cooperative)

Part of the reason I played the first case solo was to remind myself how to play so I could “re-teach” the game to my friends! I think Charlie and Allison like mystery games almost as much as I do! They are my Escape Room/Mystery buddies!

The best part of the cooperative experience is that we share the load! The active player takes their turn, one other player consults the grid when necessary, and a different player reads the entry from the Sleuth book! This really keeps everyone involved as we play, as everyone is active during a player turn!

Not only are we sharing the physical load of consulting and reading, we are sharing the cognitive load! Frequently, puzzle games like this can be better with multiple players because one player may notice something others did not! We come up with, as a group, the shared story of what we think is happening! This cooperative experience of sharing the physical and cognitive load really just works so well.

It’s apropos that this case is called Hollywood Heartbreak because it broke our hearts that we didn’t solve this! We even took a second chance and still couldn’t break it. Granted, this case is a Veteran level mystery, but we think we missed something along the way; we “somehow” missed a clue. We think it was in the cluebook, and maybe we were SUPPOSED to see it, but we missed it? That one clue made all the difference.

Still, even when we lost, the experience was still great. My friends and I were solving (well, trying) to solve a mystery together!

Case 3: Curse of the Jade Jaguar (Cooperative)

The final case unfolded very similarly to Case 2. The one thing I noticed more explicitly is that three detectives were able to cover a lot more ground than the single detective! By splitting up and covering different parts of LA, we were able to get a lot of suspects questioned quickly! Of course, there is a little less clarity of vision with three detectives trying to come to consensus, so it balances out a little.

I have to say, this mystery was one of my favorite of all time! All the suppositions that flew around the room that were proved and disproven were so interesting! We literally figured the mystery out on the VERY LAST ACTION! I took a chance on my last question, and that proved to be the vital piece of the puzzle! It felt very tension-filled and thematic as we figured it at the last minute!

Then we read the final summary and it felt like such a satisfying conclusion! This mystery was also a Veteran mystery, but we got it!

Conclusion

Why watch a mystery show on TV tonight when you can play one? Detective: Heists & Heartbreaks is the best kind of expansion: more content! You also DO NOT have to get it unless you have completed all the cases from the original game and other expansions! This is like a new season of your favorite detective show! You can watch it after you have watched the previous seasons! (To be fair, the mysteries do not have to played in any order; they don’t depend upon each other).

Detective: City of Angels is truly one of my favorite detective games of all time: It’s #2 on my Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games, but maybe it should be #1! I always come back to this game because it’s so much fun and I really do feel like I am solving a mystery. I might have to move Detective: City of Angels to a 10/10 because I will ALWAYS play it and there is so much content for it!

A few weeks ago, my friends and I really enjoyed LA-1 (see review here); it’s a storybook game with all the trappings of a detective game, but it’s not a detective game … you don’t solve mysteries in LA-1, you explore the city and advance the plot with exploration reading from story cards. But it’s not really a mystery. It’s a great game, but you don’t solve mysteries using your brain.

Detective: City of Angels is a real mystery game with mysteries coming to life with story and clues and intuition. Detective: Heists & Heartbreak is just a new season your favorite detective show and it’s just as good as the first few seasons. It’s still very very very good.

Crime Unfolds: How Do You Express That?

Welcome back to Detective Month!  Last week, we looked at the storybook cyber-noir detective game of LA-1!  This week, we take a look at the Escape Room game of Crime Unfolds!  A Pop-Up Escape Game 3D: Immersive Crime Game!

Every few months, my friends Charlie and Allison and I get together to play games … usually Escape Room games! They are my Escape Room buddies! This month, we are trying out the Crime Unfolds cooperative Escape Room game! Nominally, we are detectives solving a crime!

We’ll discuss our first impressions and thoughts on the Crime Unfolds system. It also brings up a few questions to ask yourself about Escape Room games. Why do you like them? Or maybe … Why do you dislike them?

Requires an App

Crime Unfolds requires an app!   That is maybe the first thing you should know.  Some people love Apps with their Escape Room games, and some people don’t.  It’s really not clear by looking at the book that this requires an App.  It’s not a big deal, as Charlie went and got one real quick.

There are 6 cases interspersed in this game.  We started with case 1.  We also, like many escape room games, started with lots of “random stuff we know will be useful later”.

 

Solve The Puzzle vs. Express the Answer

Over the course of one night. Charlie and Allison and Richie embarked on the first case!  It’s supposed to take an hour … it took us more than two hours.  And we are experienced Escape Roomers?? What Gives?

The problem we had over and over was not “how we do we solve the puzzle” but “how do you express the solution”?  We easily solved a bunch of the puzzles, but inputting into the app was the main hurtle!

For example: At one point, we had “shifted” away from a screen that had the arrows for directionality, so we thought we had to express NSEW via UP/DOWN or North/South/East/West using letters on the command line?  We lost at least 15 minutes … when we realized the App had those arrows in another screen.  It was very frustrating!  We had solved the puzzle, but the app had made is less than intuitive to enter.

We were pretty frustrated after this game, but after thinking about it overnight, I have come to realize that most puzzle games are like this!  You have to do two things:

  1. Solve the puzzle
  2. Express The Solution

Solving the puzzle is usually the funner part, and some games make it very easy to express the solution.  We loved Doomensions (see our review here), as expressing the solution was easy; it always took the same form as a 3 or 4 digit code.    Here in Crime Unfolds, the solution expressed itself in so many different ways! Sometimes it was interacting with some widgets on the app!  Sometimes it was saying the right thing at the command line interface!  Sometimes it pressing the right buttons!  

Our frustration with Crime Unfolds was how to express the solution!  Many times during the game, we felt like we solved the puzzle, but couldn’t move forward because the solution wasn’t expressed in the way we expected it!

After cogitating on this some more, I realized this expressing the solution can be just as interesting as solving the puzzle!  To express your solution, you have to change your perspective!! What’s the best way to express this solution?  What’s the most thematic way to express this solution?  What’s the perspective of the player in the game?  All of these contribute to different ways to express the solution.   To be fair, sometimes the expression of the solution is poorly done, and that’s just a frustration of this genre.  I think if you reset your thinking that expressing the solution is part of the puzzle, then it can less frustrating. I realize how hard it can be to do in the heat of the moment, so it’s easy to say this. 

To enjoy Crime Unfolds, you will absolutely have to enjoy thinking about new ways to express a solution to a puzzle.

 

Pop-Up Cool!  But You Need A Magnifying Glass!

One of things that was very cool about Crime Unfolds was the pop-up scenes that came out of the book!  It turns out 6 rooms in the book, and you take a turns visiting some of these rooms in each case.  They look really cool!  See above!

Unfortunately, some of the text/symbols on the board are hard to read!  At one point, Charlie went and got his “fine work” magnifying glasses/helmet!  We also used our phones to zoom in so we could see things!  

The pop-up stuff works well, but be aware that you may have to really zoom on the board.  There is just a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” and “I can barely see that” in this game.

 

Conclusion

Did we like Crime Unfolds?  Yes and no.  We only played one case, but we think it is fairly representative of what this game is.  The pop-up system works and has a very “toy” and “fun” factor to it; that was something we definitely liked.   We liked solving the puzzles but found expressing the solutions frustrating.  I think, upon further reflection, that if you go into the game knowing expression the solutions is PART of the puzzle, that might help make that more enjoyable.   

I hope I can talk Charlie and Allison into playing more cases from this book; I think there’s some fun puzzles here, but I hope we can just get over the frustrations when expressing the puzzle solutions.