Year: 2020 | Players: 1-4 | Minutes: 60+ | Ages: 14+
This Chronicles of Crime: 1400 review was made after playing through all four cases. We were sent a copy of this game by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
What is Chronicles of Crime: 1400?
Chronicles of Crime: 1400 is a cooperative, app-driven detective game in which you play as a Parisian knight in the 1400s who solves crimes with the help of his visions, his dog, and his family.
This is a standalone game in the new Millennium Series, adding just a couple of tweaks to the core system found in the original Chronicles of Crime.
Chronicles of Crime: 1400 was designed by David Cicurel and Wojciech Grajkowski, and it’s published by Lucky Duck Games.
Gameplay Overview
You can learn about the main mechanics of the game in our Chronicles of Crime review.
If you’ve played Chronicles of Crime, you can pretty much jump right into Chronicles of Crime: 1400 since its app-driven gameplay is very similar. There are four cases in this game and your job as the crime-solving knight Abelard Lavel is to go to different areas of medieval Paris to search locations, interrogate people, and hopefully solve the cases.
Here’s what’s new in 1400:
- Vision Cards – These are the visions that you have of events that are connected to the cases. They aren’t scannable cards like the rest of the cards in the game, but the images can help you narrow down your list of suspects, find important items, etc.
- Perceval – This is your super-smart dog. You can scan his card and then can scan some items, and he will often point you in the right direction.
Other than those two things, it plays pretty much the same way as the original Chronicles of Crime, just with a new setting and some new cases. You scan the locations you want to visit, search crime scenes, scan important evidence, scan people to interrogate them, get some help from your family members (they replace the forensic scientists from the original game), and then use all of that information to try to solve the cases.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- I enjoyed all four of the cases in Chronicles of Crime: 1400. The writing is strong, there are some nice twists in each case, and they all do the job of making you feel like you’re traveling around Paris in the 1400s.
- It’s hard not to like the new Vision cards. What’s really great about them is that they give you a bunch of satisfying aha moments (e.g., finding an item you saw in a vision). They also give you a clearer picture of some of the locations you visit.
- Perceval was another great addition. It’s just cool to know that you have this unique “ability” to track scents. It’s not always obvious when to call on Perceval, though, so it also forces you to think outside the box.
- This is yet another Chronicles of Crime game with fantastic art. And there’s a bit more of it in this version of the game with the inclusion of those Vision cards.
- I think they did a better job with the crime scenes in 1400 than they did in the original Chronicles of Crime. It’s easier to see everything at each scene, so there’s a lower chance that you’ll miss something.
- I think this is the first time that Lucky Duck Games perfectly nailed the difficulty ratings for each case. There’s one Easy, two Medium, and one Hard case, and that’s exactly how they all felt.
Cons
- Just like in the original game, there are a lot of repeat character cards in 1400. All of the characters in the expansion Welcome to Redview had their own unique cards, making each character a bit more memorable. I wish that they had done something like that in this game, too.
- The case “The Divine Will” was my favorite of the four, but we ended up with a pretty bad score because we didn’t continue investigating after we had solved the main case; we didn’t know we were supposed to. Not everyone will have that same experience since they might take a different path, but for us it was a pretty frustrating ending to a great case.
Final Thoughts
Chronicles of Crime is one of my group’s top cooperative board games, so it didn’t surprise me that we had a great time playing through Chronicles of Crime: 1400. They kept the great core gameplay intact while adding in some fun new twists and a new setting to give players a fresh experience. Most importantly, all four cases are interesting, challenging, and fun to try to solve. This was the Millennium Series game I was most interested in, but now I’m really looking forward to playing 1900 and 2400.
If you enjoyed playing through the original Chronicles of Crime cases, I’d definitely recommend checking out 1400. If you’ve never played Chronicles of Crimes, you can go with either the original game or 1400 since they’re mechanically nearly identical. I might give the slight edge to the original, though, because if you like it you can then get the excellent Noir expansion.
Chronicles of Crime: 1400 Links
BGG | Amazon | Cardhaus
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