0243C: Online Detectives


Our online setup for Detective

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 48

While it already felt like it was a bit of an achievement to figure out how to play Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective through a combination of Discord, Google Jamboard, and Google Drive, it was another feat to do the same for Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game today since we had more of a board that we wanted to show to help track actions and how much time we have for our investigation. 

We were originally scheduled to use the Labor Day holiday to continue playing through the Jack the Ripper campaign for Sherlock Holmes, but unforeseen technical issues forced us to change plans at the last minute. And that's what led us to Detective, a game that I had often talked about running online given other people have documented their game efforts on social media but we hadn't quite sat down to consider how to actually manage it. Like Sherlock, Detective is a deduction game so a lot of the same tools and approaches still apply. But then it has nuanced aspects that make it distinct including the action board, the different locations, and of course the digital component of the Antares police database.

So we used the same tools that we did in Sherlock, but in very different was. The Jamboard really became the central platform for our character dossiers, mind maps, and speculations and we quickly fell into a rhythm for how to go about collating our information. The collaborative nature of the platform can result in some chaotic interactions as multiple people add new items at the same time, but on the whole, it worked out pretty well. We solved the case, or at least we answered the questions the game required of us. This particular campaign experience still has 4 more cases to go before we get to the bottom of things.

Not all tabletop games have been able to make the transition to digital quite so well and I'm glad that we took the plunge and finally tried it. 

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