Year: 2018 | Players: 1-4 | Minutes: 30+ | Ages: 14+
This Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview 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 Welcome to Redview?
Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview is the second expansion for the cooperative detective game Chronicles of Crime. In Welcome to Redview you are a group teenagers in the 1980s who are trying to figure out why strange things are happening in your town.
This expansion was designed by David Cicurel and Ghislain Masson, and it is published by Lucky Duck Games.
Rules Overview
You can learn about the main mechanics of the game in our Chronicles of Crime review.
In Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview you play through a four-chapter campaign as the Redview Mystery Gang, a group of teens who investigate local mysteries. Each chapter takes place in a small town in 1980s Maine and the characters you run into can show up in multiple chapters.
Unlike the other Chronicles of Crime cases that have been released so far, in Welcome to Redview each player gets to play as his or her own character. The characters have three skills: Fitness, Speech, and Mind. The app lets you know when you have the opportunity to perform skill tests and you can usually choose between two or three of them. When you perform a test, each player rolls their die and adds their stat to the roll. As a team, you’re hoping to roll a number of successes (fives and sixes) equal to the number of players. You’ll gain two successes if you roll a seven or higher. Each character also has energy tokens that they can use to roll again if the team needs more successes. You regain your energy tokens at the beginning of each new day.
Since you’re playing as teens in high school, you can’t spend all night working on these cases. If you don’t make it back to your tree house/home base by 10:00 pm every night, points will be deducted from your final score. You’ll often be in the middle of a conversation or a search and will need to decide if you want to break your curfew or not.
Other than those things, the game plays pretty much exactly like the base game; you ask characters questions, you search for clues at different locations, and you try to put it all together to solve the cases.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- I like how every decision you make seems to change how the stories play out. I don’t actually know if that’s true or not since I’ve only played through each chapter once, but this expansion makes you feel like every decision matters, which adds just a bit more tension to the game.
- Everyone knows everyone in this small-town world the designers created, so an important part of your job is to figure out what to trust every time you ask someone about other people in town. That’s definitely thematic and it makes this expansion pretty tough because most of the people you run into will have something to say about every person you ask them about.
- I’m so glad that each character card represents the same person through all four chapters. In the base game and Noir, it was kind of odd seeing different people with the same faces and clothes as people you had met in past cases.
- I really like the cartoon/comic book look of the cards, location boards, and the scenes in the app. This style kind of reminds me of the video game Borderlands 2.
- The new hint system works really well. We did get stuck a couple of times and I liked that the hints pushed us in the right direction without giving us too much information.
Cons
- We decided to play one chapter per game night and, since this expansion is a four-part story, the plan was to look at each game’s ‘History’ for a refresher before we started a new chapter. Well, the app failed to save our progress each time, so we didn’t have a chance to do that. That was a bummer and it made some parts of the second, third, and fourth chapters kind of confusing.
- I REALLY disliked one of the cases/chapters. Our mission was to find something, so we found that something and thought we had solved the case. We thought we had done well, but we ended up getting a terrible score because we didn’t run into or hear about one important character who would have given us information about something we hadn’t heard about from anyone else. That was frustrating.
- There were a lot more typos in the app for these cases than in the other ones. That’s not a huge deal, but it did pull me out of the world for a few seconds.
Final Thoughts
Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview is another solid expansion for this very solid game. The cool thing about this being an app-driven game is that most of the issues I have with it can be fixed in an update.
Three of the four cases in this expansion were my least favorites of all of the Chronicles of Crime cases I’ve played, but one of them was probably my favorite overall so far. I do think Noir is the better expansion of the two, but I still definitely recommend Welcome to Redview if you’re a Chronicles of Crime fan, especially if this theme interests you.
Welcome to Redview Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
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