Chronicles of Crime: 1400

Setup

The physical game components consist of multiple decks of cards depicting locations, characters, special items, visions, and evidence categories (such as “clothes” or “signs and symbols”) that may be relevant for each case, as well as a board to arrange your evidence on.

Additionally, you need a mobile device to run the Chronicles of Crime companion app.

Gameplay

At the start of a game, you choose in the app which case you want to play. During a short introduction, you will hear about an important character or two, and a location where you can start your investigation.

You will also be told which Vision cards to draw and look at. These represent prophetic dreams your character has had and usually depict scenes connected to the case in some as yet unknown way.

Early on in a case, you will get to search the scene of the crime. This is done by looking around a 360 degree image in the app and picking the cards representing the different evidence categories present at the scene.

You move around the investigation by scanning the QR codes on locations, the characters there, and the pieces of evidence you want to ask them about.

Their answers may reveal new information, lead you to new locations, or make you aware of new characters.

Your character can also ask his family (a monk, a merchant, and a spy) for help with their certain skill sets. And you can track and find characters by showing objects with their scent to your tracking dog.

Each case usually has a deadline, meaning the in-game time by which you need to give a solution. Each piece of evidence found, each character interrogated, and each location travelled to add to the time spent, so you have to choose your actions with care.

When you think you have all the pieces of information necessary to solve the case, you press “Solve the Case” in the app and answer a series of questions. By the end, the app tells you if you were correct or not, and gives you a written summary of the full course of events.

Play Experience

The way the narratives and the investigation mechanics merge together is very satisfying, and the pacing of each case is generally good.

At the start, you get pieces of information dripped to you with logical, linear places to go. Then, once you’ve visited the scene of the crime, gathered evidence, and asked the few characters you’ve met about it, your pool of locations, suspects, and items explodes with multiple leads to follow, sometimes to unexpected places.

This can be overwhelming, and sometimes you do get to a stage where you lose track of who you have asked about what. Or you feel like you’ve been everywhere and tried everything, and yet you have no idea where to go next.

In that situation, my best suggestion would be to go back to the scene of the crime and search it again. More than once, we’ve missed some item that wasn’t important initially but suddenly becomes key.

Apart from those few roadblocks, however, the mystery and investigation usually flows and develops steadily.

Some cases have built-in timed events that will trigger at certain points in the investigation to introduce some new aspect and put everything you already know in a new context. I really liked that, especially how talking to characters about another character or a piece of evidence would change wildly before and after such an event.

In general, I really enjoyed how sophisticated the interrogations are. Characters can have different responses depending on what you’ve shown them before and where you meet them.

I also liked how the case deadline helped me focus my investigations and be economical about where to go and what to do there.

Difference From Other Games In The Series

I am a big fan of the Chronicles of Crime games, and 1400 would be my favourite one.

I love the setting of medieval Paris, I love the dog companion (Perceval!), and I especially love the inclusion of the Visions.

The latter two aspects are a subtle difference from the mechanics in other games in the series, but they have a huge impact on how one as a player interacts with the game.

Being able to track down missing suspects or witnesses by showing their items to the dog is much more immersive and interesting than manually jumping between locations and scanning the character cards in the hopes that they will be there.

And it’s amazing when a character from a Vision from the start of the game suddenly shows up and you know there is a connection but you still have to find out which pieces of evidence will get them to tell you.

Replayability

1400 includes one tutorial case and four full-length cases of difficulties from Easy to Hard. They usually take 1-2 hours to complete, meaning that the game has about 6.5 hours of gameplay in it from start to finish.

Each case only has one solution, but there are generally multiple ways to get there depending on which characters you show what evidence to and when. For that reason, it may be fun to attempt a case again a while after playing it the first time, to try and get a different experience.

Especially if you did not solve the case the first time.

That said, I would not call 1400 a highly replayable game, at least for the same play group. But as no components are destroyed or altered, the game is perfectly replayable by a different group. I know our copy has been making the rounds of our friend group already.

Similar Games

If you like the sound of app assisted mystery solving, but the Middle Ages are not your preferred setting, there are multiple other Chronicles of Crime games.

The base game (Chronicles of Crime) lets you investigate murders and other crimes as police officers in modern day London, and with the expansions you can either be a hardboiled private investigator in the 1950’s Los Angeles, or teen members of the Redview Mystery Gang in 1980’s Maine.

Moreover, 1400 is the earliest instalment of the Millenium Series, which also contains 1900 (where you play as a journalist on the hunt for scoops) and 2400 (in which Paris is a cyber-dystopia). The protagonists in each instalment all belong to the same family, and certain characters and elements pop up across the series, making it a very satisfying experience to play through them all.

That said, maybe you want to solve mysteries without the involvement of any technology. In that case, I would recommend any of the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective games, or, if you want more supernatural cases, Mythos Tales.

Finally, if you like the Visions mechanic in 1400, you should check out House of Danger, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style game where you navigate a weird and deadly mystery as a psychic investigator.

Final Thoughts

Chronicles of Crime: 1400 is a fun detective game with a range of different types of mysteries, interesting characters, and a cool setting. The use of the app enables more nuanced and specific investigations than is generally possible in storybook detective games.

If you like solving mysteries and crimes in a game, I recommend you try this one.