A new Kickstarter for Chronicles of Crime (CoC) just got announced, and I’ve really enjoyed their last two series of games so I was thinking “Damn, I can back this and then get even more great games from a great series”, but then I had an even BETTER idea. What if I wrote a stupid long article ranking all of the cases from the Millennium Series (ie CoC: 1400, 1900, 2400, and Chronicles of Time) and then Lucky Duck liked it SO MUCH they just sent me their next series of games for free! It’s a perfect plan with no drawbacks! Like, sure, there’s a reasonable chance they don’t even know this article ever exists, and I’m probably not going to finish it before the Kickstarter starts, and I already said I would back it so there’s also no point in them sending me the games for free, it is only losing them money. But none of these points were good enough to stop me, so I’ll do it anyway!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with CoC let me give you a brief summary: you solve crimes.

OK, so that’s the gist, like seriously, that’s what you do. You go to different crime scenes and examine them, find evidence, interrogate suspects, and come to a final conclusion about who the culprit is and why they did it. Bosh! The fact it’s so simple really works in its favour. And I have completely positive feelings about the app integration because I want to be sent a free copy of the game and insulting it would therefore be a bad idea! But jokes aside, it is great 99% of the time, and the issues I have with it are mostly “My phone is shit and it crashes sometimes” so it’s hardly game ruining.

I decided to look at their second series of games, the Millennium Series, mostly because I owned all of the cases anyway and I didn’t want to buy the DLC cases for the base game, so it was just the more economical decision, and I think the 3 different versions of the game all have their positives and negatives.

This article will be a ranking of 19 different cases that feature across the four boxes. I have played most of these before writing this article, but it was long enough ago that I replayed all the cases anyway, and there were only a couple of bits here and there that I remembered. I’m aiming for this to be short, but based on this intro I think we both know that’s not going to happen. So, without further ado: let us begin! Oh yeah, spoilers throughout, obviously.

Oh yeah, there’s also a bunch of swearing from the start because I originally planned for this to be PG then changed my mind half way through, but wrote the entries out of order so the tone changes wildly from section to section… enjoy!

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19) 2400: Icarus Descends:

I may have come to the realisation that there is an inherent flaw of writing a ranking while simultaneously begging someone to give me a free copy of a game, namely that the early sections of the article are always going to skew negative. This isn’t the best idea when the ethos of this article should be “Wow, I love this game! Give me stuff for free!”. I would think about changing this, but it’s too late now! I’ve committed to the bit already and good God will I not back down! However, that doesn’t mean I won’t chicken out and start with the positives of this case anyway.

There are a lot of little individual aspects of this case I found really neat. Of the two cases in the millennium series that serve as a start of a series of cases, this felt the most promising. There were loads of different aspects which I wanted to see developed: the rivalries of the different gangs, the development of the icarus drugs and its repercussions, the working of Belcor, and even more on top of that! I felt that there were a lot of different directions this could develop and I was interested to see how it would play out.

Sadly, when i finished the scenario my main thoughts were “At least there’s a base to build on” because this, quite frankly, just wasn’t good.

First things first, we stan corrupt cops working for the people in power! What a unique and original trope, and so unlike reality it’s unlikely to ever happen again in this set of adventures! And we’re investigating the death of one… that sounds fun! Well, have I got bad news for you, solving the murder very much feels like an afterthought! And that’s because at some point in the case you find a video showing exactly who committed the murder… This really annoys me for one simple reason, it goes against EVERYTHING this game stands for! I’m not solving shit, I’m being told who did it and then working backwards! Sure, knowing that is interesting but that should probably come BEFORE being told who did it. It’s SO frustrating and doesn’t make for any feeling of satisfaction in having worked out what’s going on. And then when you confront her she just tells you everything anyway.

Unfortunately, this half of the mystery is somehow the better of the two! Finding proof the obviously corrupt cop was corrupt wasn’t fun. Just look at the guy! Come on! This isn’t an interesting thing to do anyway, but it also suffers in the execution, where seemingly the only way to solve the issue is to find a single money card thing in one of the AR scenes, which was really frustrating. And this brings me onto one of my big issues with the 2400 version of the game, how unclear it is compared to the other versions of Chronicles of Crime.

I know what money looks like in the modern day and the past, but if your iconography is bad how am I supposed to know what money looks like in the future? It’s so fucking annoying! The AR scenes in 2400 are already typically far more cluttered than their counterparts, making them hard to parse, and if that wasn’t bad enough, half the time I don’t even know what the thing I’m meant to be looking at is characterised as. Like, seriously, “That’s not a tool, that’s clearly a medical injector” how the FUCK was I meant to know that? It just looks like a *thing*! It’s really frustrating and spoils a lot of my fun when playing 2400, and the money card was probably the most difficult to identify mandatory object in any of the cases This single aspect is enough for this case to rank extremely lowly on the list. And obviously, it did.

The other thing that really annoyed me is I had managed to work out EVERYTHING that was going on with the case, and I still didn’t score great at the end. Sure, I let a guy die, so some points should probably be knocked for that, but it was also like “You don’t know anything about Icarus.” BITCH, I could have written a mother fucking essay about Icarus, I just didn’t talk to the Faceless about what exactly it was doing before telling them Belcor was snaking them! My God! I didn’t deserve to score great, but I deserved better than I got. I’ll complain about scoring again in the future, but this was the most egregious case.

Now, I’ve been very negative so far, and that’s because I didn’t like this case, but fundamentally I enjoyed every other case in the series, and a 95% hit rate is pretty fucking good. I’d also like to end on another positive for this case, and that’s that I really enjoyed the second corrupt cop (wow, two corrupt cops in one universe, a statistical anomaly) because she’s really pro-active in trying to prove she isn’t corrupt. It’s a neat and easy little twist that was a fun solve.

18) 1400: Tutorial

Yes, I’m ranking the tutorials too, don’t question me!

The tutorials are all compelling and fun in their own right. They’re biggest downside is they’re not full cases, so they lack a lot of the cool moments that longer cases have. But equally, they don’t overly hold your hand. They tell you what you need to do, and the cases are easy and simple, but they still require solving. You can’t just turn your brain off and it plays the game for you, so there is still some enjoyment to be had. In saying that, however, the tutorial for 1400 definitely feels like the least fully developed of the three.

This case focuses on you finding the location of a stolen ring, and as you well know, thievery is BORING, I want a tasty bit of MURDER. The answer to who stole the ring is simple: “Who cares?”.

This tutorial introduces all of the characteristics of 1400 very well. Percival is vital for solving the case, and it even has a red herring for him to scan so that you have a better understanding of how he works mechanically, which is clever. The three family members you have at home are also all used in distinct ways, with one providing explicit evidence that can be used in a theory, one providing explicit new evidence, and one using this new evidence to reveal a new location. It shows all of the different things they can do efficiently and easily. 

The visions, which are a mechanic I have mixed feelings on, are definitely not used at their best here. It tells you about which character you should interrogate about a specific thing, but that’s it. This is partially because there is only a single card revealed, and a lot of the most interesting deductions come from comparing different visions. They are at least shown to be useful here, but they make the tutorial easier, and it’s a tutorial, it’s already easy, it doesn’t need to be easier.

I don’t have too much to say about the mystery itself. There is a logical flow to it, and it makes sense. There are pretty much confessions from multiple people in case you missed something, which for a tutorial I do appreciate. It was also probably the quickest of the tutorials for me probably, solving it in probably about 15 minutes real time, so it was a nice little exercise. I’d actually really like some VERY short cases, as I think you can do some interesting things with it, and base most of the cases on replaying them, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about now.

This was fine, I quite enjoyed it. But that’s kind of it. But, for a tutorial, what more could you want? Well, a fair bit actually, seeing as I think the other 2 are better. But it’s also not bottom of the list so it clearly did something right.

17) 1900 Tutorial:

I really like CoC 1900, which is surprising as of the three games in the millennium series I was least excited for. Why? Because as much as I love escape rooms and puzzles, I used to work in them professionally and have a very critical eye when it comes to them, so I was expecting to just get very annoyed at them and have them ruin my experience.

Most of my opinions on escape room puzzles are “these are bad, but I enjoy them anyway”, and the tutorial unfortunately lived up to these expectations exactly. There’s exactly one puzzle here and it isn’t good. Why? Because Morse Code puzzles SUCK! They’re boring and everything you can do with them has pretty much been done already. Like, sure, if you’re using sound you could maybe do something with it in an interesting way. But they didn’t! It didn’t use sound at all! I don’t care how you try to justify it, “oh, they fell in love in a telegraph office”, so they converted their names into morse code? Get a life! The moment I saw the Morse Code cypher I died a little inside, slowly decaying more and more until the puzzle was eventually solved. I didn’t enjoy this puzzle at all.

However, I really liked everything else about the case! This felt like the best tutorial of the three in terms of teaching you how to play the game without holding your hand or not giving enough direction. Sure, I know it’s below the 2400 tutorial and I just called it the best Tutorial, but this is a ranking of how much I enjoyed them, not how good they are. Yes, of course they’re different things, do not question me further!

This case used a classic trope which I enjoyed IN A TUTORIAL, because it’s a classic for a reason. Namely, someone confessing to a crime they didn’t commit to cover for someone else. It’s very obvious whenever it happens, but it’s a clever way of establishing a motive, and in a lot of ways acts as a way to confirm your theory in a slightly less explicit way. It also works because it’s an obviously fake confession. If it was convincing I’d be annoyed, but luckily it isn’t.

The case outside of this is fairly good too, although I find it frankly insane that a poor woman thinks she can get away with saying she murdered a high class man with little consequence… Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but she’s boned man, death sentence all the way baby. And she just… doesn’t seem to realise that completely took me out of it for a moment. Sure, in this day and age I think justice is more likely to be done, and even then not always, but this is explicitly set in the past. Don’t undermine that in your very first case!

The other thing this case did was introduce me to the single best character in chronicles of crime. No, not a puzzle lady I never talk to or annoying boss, but weird police office uncle! Like seriously he rules. “Let’s get my unpaid nephew to solve my cases for me” is some real King shit. I also enjoy how no one seems to like him and he’s an idiot! And a police officer! I see no connection! Anyway, when I was making notes of this case the first thing I wrote was “If anything happens to protags annoying uncle I will tear the studio fucking down. “ which remains true to this day. And the fact that a tutorial can do that is impressive, but sadly most of the full cases are just better.

16) 1400: The Divine Will

Assigning each scenario a difficulty level, while being arbitrary, can actually have a significant effect on the game. Having a pre-conceived notion about how hard something is going to be fundamentally changes the way you approach and think about it. One of the reasons I have Icarus Descends rates so low on the list as it does is because it called itself easy and I found it the hardest of the 2400 cases in a lot of ways. This case has the exact opposite issue for me, despite being listed as a medium, I probably found this case the easiest of all the ones outside of the tutorials.

I consider the difficulties in Chronicles of Crime to less be about what score you get (which often feels very different to how well you’ve done), and more a measure of how easy it is to conceptually understand just what is going on in the case. But in saying that, this is a case I found easy but also scored extremely well in, and I really enjoyed my journey to get there. The monk dude I can’t be bothered to look up the name of, the missing girl I can’t be bothered to look up the name of, and the knight man I can’t be bothered to look up the name of were all really cool characters who I had a lot of fun interacting with. And slowly unravelling all their relationships with each other was a fun process. The investigation, at least for me, flowed very smoothly from point to point, with perhaps the only exception being me feeling a bit directionless at the end of the first day, but I now realise that’s because I had to waste a bit more time until the next set piece happened.

I also really enjoyed the repercussions of the fire and the fake out with the corpse, this was a really really neat touch! That whole scene was a great AR one, and while I was pretty quickly certain who the corpse was, the few minutes of working that out were great! I’d have liked a few more viable candidates for the corpse (there are only 3 women in the whole case) but it was still an interesting enough problem to solve. And I know what you’re thinking dear reader, you’re thinking I’m sounding very positive for a case so far down on the list, but don’t worry, I’M GETTING TO IT.

I really enjoyed the plot of this case, I thought it was fun and interesting, and plays on some tropes I really like, like the fake kidnapping, which while obvious was fun. But this case also features a fake confession which is something which I’ve already talked about in this ranking in a positive sense. But that was a tutorial, this is a full case, and fake confessions tell you SO MUCH about the motive of what’s happening. The moment I heard the fake confession the whole story fell a little too neatly into place for my liking. And while I still enjoyed the characters, there was now no sense of mystery at all because I had worked out exactly what had happened, and now all I was doing was slowly going through the motions of proving it and that’s not super fun. But this happened pretty late in the case, so surely it didn’t affect my enjoyment too much. However, it sure would suck if there were some component of this case which revealed all the nuance of this case before the case had even started, but that seems really unlikely to happen… OH WAIT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED.

This case was ruined by those stupid fucking prophecy cards. I already worked out half of what was going to happen right from the moment I saw them! Sooo much of the tension of the case was gone because they made it so clear almost exactly what was going on from the start. The only thing I got wrong was the motive of what was happening, and even then only slightly, everything else I was just correct on from before the beginning. I even knew the fire was coming so that wasn’t even a shock, simply an eventuality we were hurtling towards! I once wrote a scientific paper on why causality cannot scientifically exist, but this case made me rethink all of that! The whole thing almost felt like a waste of time! What I thought would happen happened, and that’s the whole story! Hmph! But I enjoyed the journey at least, so it’s not all bad.

15) 2400: The Endgame

Now this is an interesting one, because I really liked everything in this case, except for one thing, and that one thing is bad enough to put it this low down on the list.

I really enjoy cases where you have independent parties acting in ways which make sense without being too over the top. People act suspiciously because that’s what they’re like, and they react to situations with appropriate responses. Shout out to the one woman who cares when we kill her robot, everyone else is so chill and she’s, quite rightly like “what the FUCK?” and refuses to talk to you. (I didn’t do this, but I’m glad it’s there and me being able to get away with this scot free in previous cases really annoyed me.) She also actively doesn’t care that her cheating husband is dead. She’s just there like “Yeah, I’m busy doing science, stop bothering me” which is an absolute vibe.  She can also die horribly at the end, which is fun.

Outside of that, I felt that this case was truly one of the more difficult cases without being unfair. There were locations which were hard to get to, but I think all of them had multiple ways of reaching them so there were no huge bottlenecks, even if you managed to piss off cool wife who only cares about her shit AI. FYI: the fact that the thing she cares about is objectively terrible only makes her cooler.

The name of the case is also interesting, with important characters named after chess pieces and this whole case basically being about two people fighting for control of a metaphorical board and the player being one of the pieces, it feels very appropriate to what’s going on. This is a fun concept, and it feels well done here. The world feels like a dynamic place, and your decisions feel like they have an impact on the events that are unfolding. The final showdown also exemplified this, where if you have played well and are where the action is happening, you have to solve some very specific steps to save the day. It’s a lot of fun! Or it would be, if it wasn’t for one things, the mother fucking BUGS.

This case broke on me in the final fucking confrontation. I was unable to do anything to fix it even though I had solved the fucking case! I was at 100% battery and none of my fucking mods worked; there was NOTHING I could do other than watch girlboss wife die, and I was pissed! I had to restart the WHOLE FUCKING CASE just so I could redo this confrontation and it absolutely spoiled the experience. Sure, playing through the case again gave me a deeper understanding of what was going on and made me like the story more, BUT I DIDN’T NEED TO LIKE IT MORE. I already fucking liked it! I was just annoyed at wasting time. If I’d known how close I was to the end I may not have restarted it, but I didn’t know how close to the end I was! Because, y’know, that’s how the game works! This was my single lowest moment of any scenario, and writing this now I’m genuinely wondering if I put this too high here. This case is just lucky the rest of the case was so good…

14) 2400 Tutorial:

The final of the three tutorials, and in a lot of ways, this was the biggest failure as a tutorial. There were some ambiguities, and you’re left to your own devices with a far larger chance of missing what’s going on than in the other tutorials. Having to focus on the mural in the background of one of the AR scenes is also probably the easiest clue to miss amongst the tutorials because you assume it is just background. The raven is poorly explained and poorly utilised (even after having done all the cases I’m not 100% what it does). Like, this really doesn’t work well as a tutorial.

Luckily I don’t give a shit about that, the case is fun! This is the only one of the tutorials which feels like you’re playing an actual case, with different factions working together. You also don’t immediately work out who did it the moment you meet them, and instead things slowly are unveiled before you. It lacks the nuance and depth to be a really great case, but it’s a fun half hour of solving.

I also loooove the writing in this case. I mean, not because it’s good, but who cares about how good something is? It’s funny! Like seriously, every time I read “everything changed after THE WAR sixty years ago” I burst out laughing. The world building is so on the nose it’s entertaining, and I’m hardly taking this seriously. If you hadn’t noticed from my tone throughout this article, as much as I love this game, I see it as a fun crime game and not a serious crime game. And this case got that tone perfectly right, namely, it’s just kind of funny.

13) 1400: The Missing Pages

I bet most of you thought this would be a short article… IDIOTS! I am far too SMART and GOOD AT THINGS to be constrained by more traditional notions of how long an article should be! I say that if you write an article and it isn’t long enough to create a leather bound tome of sufficient weight such that striking it into a mans skull would surely kill them then what’s even the fucking point?

Speaking of books killing people, that’s what this case is about! What a smooth segue…

If someone was playing Chronicles of Crime for the first time, this is probably the case I would recommend for them to play as their first full case. There’s nothing too hard to grasp about it, and the visions in this case are well chosen, giving about the right amount of information that you have a few things to go on without giving the entire game away. Working out what has and hasn’t happened yet is also a neat but easy puzzle to solve.

Not that this case is perfect; the question at the end about where the victim got potential contracts from was poorly phrased at best, and kind of pointless at worst. However the decision of who you give the manuscript back to is one of my favourite final questions in the series so it all evens out. I really enjoy that no matter how well you do or who you give the book to, the abbot never wins. This is such a lovely bittersweet narrative decision, it shows the scope of what the game can do in a simple way and that’s really nice.

Also shout out to the most useless character in the game (your monk uncle, muncle for short, who knows about books) actually having something to do in this case! What a useless lad. What does he do when there’s nothing to read? Just crawl in a hole and die? What a Goddamn vibe.

Also, we stan corrupt cops working for the people in power! What a unique and original trope, and so unlike reality it’s unlikely to ever happen again in this set of adventures!

If you couldn’t tell by the number of pointless asides in this section I have VERY little to say about this case. It’s fine, and while it lacks the highs a couple of the cases below it in the list, it lacks any of the lows. It’s a fun journey from beginning to end!

12) 1400: The Pursuit of Knowledge

How well I do on a case usually doesn’t affect how much I like it. There are cases I did very well on I dislike, and cases I fucking bombed that I think are really good. Usually I’m able to notice the good and bad and separate my feelings from my performance. But there are always exceptions to the rules, and this is one of those exceptions.

I did really badly in this case, I got 50/100 and didn’t have a clue who did it, which for me was about as poorly as I did. I also got really stuck talking in circles without making any progress for a fair few hours of in game time which was doubly frustrating. Like, I was genuinely just really stupid, and had to play the game twice to have any concrete idea of who did it. I missed some obvious interrogation lines and that’s on me, but even when I found them in my second playthrough, I still just didn’t care about what was going on. I was so stupid I checked out, but these things happen sometimes, and I wanted to still give it my best go.

This also wasn’t a fun case, not in the sense that I didn’t have fun playing it (which I didn’t really) but that the whole tone of this case was just grim. There was a rape subplot, and while murderia fun to look into, rape is just bleak. Like, I’m here for enjoyment, not to feel sad. There was even a subplot which seemed promising with an ominous drawing, and then the reveal was just “Psyche! It’s a miscarriage baby!” and I was just like my God, I just wanted something fun and silly in this case!

Look, hot take, but crimes and murder in real life are bad and dark and grim and sad. But this is a game! And I play games to have fun. This case was good, well structured, and did some really interesting stuff, but I didn’t care about any of it enough to write about here because the subject matter put me off. I’m glad this case exists, and it did what it was trying to, I just didn’t enjoy it very much.

11) 1900: Belly of the City

I thought this case was fine. Like, there was nothing wrong with it, but it’s not up there with my favourites… Obviously, this is a ranking so you can see exactly where in the list it falls, which is 11th out of 19, because that’s how a ranking works, and if you’d failed to notice by this point then I weep for your common sense. Why are you reading this? Also, if you haven’t played the game, why are you reading this? Get a life, do something, play this game, but don’t read this article! I mean, thank you, I really appreciate it, but come on! Make something of the time you have, it is finite and it will be gone before you know it. The void comes for us all, its yawning more treats us all as equals as we plummet towards oblivion!

Anyway, one thing I didn’t enjoy in this one was the subplot. Usually I really like the subplots in this game, finding out who was responsible for a minor incident adds an extra bit of spice to any case. This is one of the only cases where you’re told precisely what the subplot is, namely trying to find a German Spy. The issue with this was that by the time I was told to “watch out for small hints to work out who the spy is” I has already fucking worked it out! My God! At least have it be something that doesn’t take 5 minutes.

This is a follow up to a previous case, but I use that term loosely as they are almost entirely independent and I would probably have preferred it if it had been entirely standalone, as this felt like it barely followed on from the previous case. Exactly two characters from the previous case appear in it; that’s not enough! So much potential, squandered! The only other thing in common was the motivation/group of the culprits in the two cases, which I felt had already been explored well enough in the previous case. They also ignore any subtlety the villain might have by going “and they have a BOMB” to make you realise this isn’t a game about nuance. I was also annoyed that by the time I talked to the culprit I was already 100% sure he did it, and he didn’t really introduce himself so the dialogue felt stilted and didn’t make loads of sense. And then they started shooting at me and it didn’t make any difference mechanically for some reason. Like, I just stood there and got shot at and didn’t care

Anyways, this case has a few unique features that I wasn’t super fond of. Most noticeably was a big puzzle at the end that was defusing a bomb. While this was well set up, I never really enjoy puzzles where if you fail the consequence is death, especially in an experience you’re probably only going to attempt once. Sure, I got the puzzle right and I found it quite interesting, but I didn’t like it in theory. Imagine failing a scenario because you can’t solve a puzzle, it SUCKS. The other puzzles in this scenario were also bad. Do I remember what they were? No, but my notes just read “Bad Puzzles!!!!” so I’ll trust my former judgement and do no checking because I have wasted enough of my life writing this. The void etc etc, oblivion etc etc.

This has been pretty negative so far, and that’s because the things it does well are things which aren’t fun to discus. It’s all just decent. The main thing I enjoyed was when I met a character and the first thing I did was show him a random item for no real reason and he immediately was like “YES, I ADMIT, I DID IT FOR EXACTLY THE REASONS YOU THINK, LET ME TELL YOU EVERYTHING.” Which was at least helpful because I had no clue who he was or why he was doing anything, but was also really really fucking funny.

Overall, a few annoyances hold this vase back from being great, but it’s still fun. And I got like 130 points which made me feel good about myself so that’s nice. Not nice enough to rank it any higher though…

10) 2400: Ariadne’s Fate

I really enjoyed this one! People online really seem to not like this case… glad to know I’m the only right person on the internet and everyone else is STUPID! I’ve always intrinsically known this of course, but it’s great to finally have evidence to back me up!

This case had something I absolutely love on murder mystery media, namely a small pool of suspects who you are introduced to very early. They also all fill easily described roles: Leader, Conspiracy Theorist, Victim’s Friend, Outcast, Survivor. These are broad terms of varying accuracy, but the idea stands. You have suspects who form roles in a team, and all the evidence from the jump suggests one of them did it. This is GREAT. Too many cases in this game have suspects drip fed to you, and I know some suspects appear before others, but you know about them from the start. It makes the mystery feel more personal and interesting.

The potential of having to match avatars with their real world counterparts is also a nice touch. Like, this is probably my favourite pool of suspects from any case because of how Agatha Christie the whole thing is; and I looooove Agatha Christie! I think Chronicles of Crime should try and explore situations like this more often.

We also are immediately presented with 2 crimes! A murder and traitor in the midst of the team. This is great! You don’t know if they’re one and the same, and you aren’t even sure the traitor is real, or if they’re the victim! It is a setup so up my alley that I was always going to enjoy this case.

This case also benefited from being the second in a trilogy, and it is MUCH better than the first part of this trilogy, so I was always going to look at it positively. And while I felt there could have been a couple more call backs to the first case outside of “one of the people you met died” I again felt the ideas it was setting up were interesting. The whole last section of this case is a tad controversial, with another murder happening, no questions asked about it, and it is entirely there for setup. Because the culprit is so obvious I immediately realised it was there for context for the third case (and on reflection it’s GOOD context) and I loved this touch, elevating the case again.

In terms of thingsI liked less, it had a confession from the killer which made the case feel easier than it would have otherwise. I also worked out who did it more from vibes and meta-knowledge than facts, but that’s allowed, I got all the points baby!

Everything outside of the crime I liked less though. There’s a lot of breaking into buildings and hacking mainframes and I kind of just… didn’t care. I already had cool crimes I wanted to solve, but I had to spend a lot of my time doing stuff I didn’t find interesting. If there was more of a focus on solving the crimes and less in committing new ones I’d have liked the case more, but I still had a really fun time with it.

9) 1400: The Light In The Dark

This is a really interesting case because of how deceptively simple it is. There are political dealings, secret treasure, corruption and more; and what this case comes down to is someone covering their tracks for a crime they committed. And that’s really really cool! This is the case which has felt the most like seeing the wood for the trees, there is so much going on, and you have a much clearer time of it if you just ask yourself the question “Did the person who probably did it, do it?” To which the answer was; yes, they did.

I also really enjoyed the culprit in this case. They were a jerk basically no one liked, and acted like a jerk no one liked. This was great! They also were just like “What’s that? I’ve never seen that before!” when I showed them all of my mountains of evidence proving they did it. We love a guy who can look at absolute proof they’re guilty and just go “Nah, man doesn’t care” and then carries on casually killing more people. Honestly it would have been more in keeping for them to just murder us when confronted with their guilt, they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again!

The occult is an interesting angle presented in this case, and I wish a little more had been made of it. The player character literally has visions, as does another character in this case, but they barely talk about or bond over this shared experience. And with the undertone of witch hunts, the player character never seems to fear for their own life even though they’re literally magic. Seems a bit silly to me. I wish that had been more of a focus, instead of basically an unrelated aspect of the case introduced by the culprit (who again, is great) to confuse the situation.

I mentioned in passing earlier, but there is a secret treasure in this scenario, and for a trope I’m not super fond of (The Nancy Drew games have burnt me out forever on it) I found it really refreshing that it wasn’t the motive for the murder here, and in fact almost entirely unrelated. I didn’t really like how you went about finding the treasure, but that is a minor gripe. I’m just glad we got a motive which was more than “Capitalism!” which is usually how finding treasure goes in mystery media.

The one thing in this scenario I found really annoying was identifying something as a plant in the first scene meant I wasn’t able to answer a question correctly at the end even though I knew exactly how it was done…

This case was fun and a good level of challenge, and I liked all of the subplots just as much as the plot. It didn’t do anything spectacularly well, and it lacked a real “Aha” moment, but regardless, it was a lot of fun!

8) 1400: The Last Bath

And so the last of the 1400 cases falls. This might seem quite low for the top case, and that’s because it is! Maybe some of the above cases are ranked too high, but OH WELL! As I write this I have less than 30 hours until the kickstarter finished, and I want some free games, so it’s too late to do anything about it now! I felt that 1400 was a pretty consistent set, with none of the cases being truly bad, with the only case I have ranked very low that low because I’m a petty bitch. I also never had too much enjoyment from the vision cards, or the protagonist’s family. But I do think 1400 is a pretty good box for beginners.

Anyway, this is an unfortunate case to be at the top of the list for 1400 as it has a lot of things in it which I think are pretty poor, but I like the case in spite of them! This is a case where I think some of the locations and information is too hard to find, with bottlenecks preventing information from coming out more easily missed than in other games. This seems like bad game design and I fell into a few of these holes when I was playing the case, but I didn’t mind because the case was fun!

There’s a fair bit going on here, but not so much as to have the whole thing feel overwhelming. Lots of characters have secrets and pretty much all of them will reveal them to you if you play your cards right, which is satisfying to have happen, as more and more information becomes available to you, with the priest being able to go against the sanctity of confession being a great moment.

But my real highlight of this case was the second murder. This was a really interesting one to consider, and in a lot of ways ties the whole case together in a neat package, as while the first murder is fine to solve, the implications of the second murder are really interesting. Why did it happen? Why were they targeted? Once the whole story is revealed it’s a logical thing to happen, but it’s a surprise revelation when you come to it. Saving an innocent life is also a fun added touch to make you want to do well. I really enjoyed the whole vibe of this one, even the murder “weapon” in the first murder was a fun little reveal. This is a case made up of a lot of different nice little moments.

I played this one twice, not because I did particularly badly the first time (but that was mostly down to guesswork and luck than skill), but becayse I wanted to know more about everything that was going on. I found this whole case so interesting! In my second playthrough when the implication of Perciva’s interaction with the belt dawned on me I was so excited at how much this case, and this game, was trying to do! That was one of my favourite moments of any Chronicles of Crime case. There were a few things that made less sense, like how you unlock certain locations, but it was nothing too annoying.

1400 is a solid set, and I would recommend anyone play it. My opinions are extremely biased, and while objectively correct of course, are no more valid than your dumb bad opinions, despite how simultaneously dumb and bad they are. I had a really neat time with the 1400 set, and I would happily play more cases with these mechanics and characters in the future!

7) A Matter of Time

Reading a ranking list is often an interesting experience, as the way people define goodness (for lack of a better word) is so personal to each author. Sometimes people will itemise every aspect, quantify them, accumulate the scores in some way and base it on that. I don’t do that because for me how good something is cannot be quantified, and how easily something can be more or less than the sum of its parts is an aspect this ranking misses. From the start I have been very clear in saying most of my opinions are vibes based. But of course there is more to it than that. In an article that is already too long, let us pause for a moment so my reasonings may become clear to you. Allow me, dear reader, to take you behind the curtain.

A gut reaction is something which is difficult to avoid, you have a good idea of how much you have enjoyed something in the immediate aftermath, and while your opinions may change in time, as often as not they don’t. And time is not something I am lucky enough to have in abundance. Again, I would like to restate, the whole point of this article is to get a free kickstarter copy of the Chronicles of Crime: Beyond Doubt Series. And so right now as I write this I am commuting home from work standing on a packed tube with barely any time until the kickstarter ends; so I don’t have time for nuanced opinions, I have time for gut reactions! If I wanted this article to be good I wouldn’t be writing it while having my face pressed into a train door now would I!

Anyway, immediately after I play a scenario I put it into a broad tier in which it may move freely, but once placed the decision is final. The breakdown of these along with placements in the ranking are as follows: Low (19th), Lower-Mid (18th – 15th), Mid (14th – 12th), Upper-Mid (11th – 8th), and High (6th – 1st). I think this is a fair breakdown, with over half the scenarios being in upper-mid and high tier., and I enjoyed all the scenarios not in Low Tier (FUCK YOU ICARUS DESCENDS) so that’s a pretty good record.

Now, the more astute of you may have noticed that a number is missing from that ranking, and you may also have realised that that placement is 7th, which also happens to be this placement. Now if you think this is a coincidence, what the hell are you thinking man? That’s stupid! Get a grip! But that’s because I put this case in a tier all on its own just called “???????” and that’s because at the time I had absolutely no idea how I felt about it.

A matter of time is barely a CoC case. Sure, it uses the normal systems, but it doesn’t feel like the game I’d spent the other 18 cases playing. And from its placement in the ranking you can tell it’s not an entirely bad thing. I enjoyed it for sure, but it’s unlike anything else in the game. If I had to compare it to anything it would be the Unlock Series of escape the room board games. And I love that series! Other than all of the MANY scenarios I don’t like because they’re bad, but they’re not important, because A Matter of Time would be a decent one!

This scenario feels more like a series of 4 smaller scenarios stuck together than one big one. The 2nd and 3rd sections of these mini scenarios (i.e. the bits not set in 2400) being my favourite, seeing as those were the bits with the most time travel. Oh yeah, if the name didn’t give it away, this is a time travel case. Luckily, it’s interesting time travel without being overly finicky, all time loops and shit, which is a fun play space (or time) to explore! You have to save the world and failure is not an option! Like, it literally isn’t. I don’t think it’s possible to fail this case…

So yeah, it’s fun, but I play Chronicles of Crime for, y’know, the crime. Conspiracies are nice but I just want a mother-fucking murder baby! So, this wasn’t what I wanted, but the system used is robust enough to run scenarios like this. In fact I’ve heard this is how most of the kids CoC game work a bit more like this, which is nice. I also enjoyed meeting characters from the different scenarios (SHOUT OUT TO MY BOY 1900s UNCLE I DON’T REMEMBER THE NAME OF, what an absolute legend) but I wish more had been made of them. We’re changing time, kill some of them off then undo it, easy win!

This case is so unlike anything else in the millennium series that comparing it to the others doesn’t feel great. But I started writing this article when I’d literally only replayed the three tutorials, so what are you going to do? I didn’t realise that I had screwed the format until I played literally the last case of the set. I’d already written most of this by then, this is like the last thing I’m writing! And I did like this case, so I should put it high-ish, even if I would probably rather do any of the regular cases instead.

I’m glad there’s only one case like this in the set, and I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been the last case I played. But I want to reflect that I enjoyed the experience and I’d be interested in seeing more stuff like this in the future. But in a different set. Not this one. But time cannot be rewritten in real life, the scenario is released, and so it goes with God. (Yes, this is an inexplicable Life of Pi ref for no reason, you’re welcome.)

6) 1900: Train from the Past

If you don’t like the 1900 set of Chronicles of Crime, buddy have I got bad news for you because it is DOMINATING the top few spots of the list. I really REALLY like this box, and it’s probably my favourite of the 4, although Chronicles of Time gives it a good run for its money. All the cases, even the only one lower than this in the list, is solid. And I think that’s because it’s the box with the least to it. The cases are basically just normal cases. Crimes set in about 1900 are fairly par for the course in crime fiction, it’s standard in a way which crimes set in the middle ages or the future aren’t. But that actually works to its advantage, you know what you’re getting, the situations presented are understood, and that allows you to do a lot with them.

This case does a lot of stuff I really like. The symmetrical nature of the two murders being a real highlight. Like, the whole concept is just REALLY cool, and the reason they could do it is because they knew that the setup is so standard. They’re willing to be more elaborate with the murder plots because we’ve seen the setting before. There’s no need to get bogged down with the Cyberpunk or Medieval setting. There’s just some people who hate each other planning their murders, what banter!

I already went on about this earlier in the list, but I really like it when you’re given a small set of people who could have committed a crime, and having to work out which of them did it. There are three in this one, and they’re less developed than in the previous one, but they’re also only one of the two murders being investigated, so I’m willing to forgive theor lack of development. I also called who did it based on the initial conversations I had with them, which was fair enough, but not a favourite moment.

Now, onto what I liked a little less. While I enjoyed how different all the puzzles were in this case, I didn’t love 2 of them. It used FUCKING MORSE CODE AGAIN, just kill me. And this one didn’t even make sense for them to do it, pissed me off. I at least solved it immediately. The dancer puzzle was too ambiguous for me to love. Sure, I solved it on the first try because I’m great, but that hardly matters. And I really enjoyed distracting someone to be able to access it, that was fun. The last puzzle in the case is one I really enjoyed conceptually, and is one of the only puzzles that actually makes use of its medium (always a plus) so even though it was a tad annoying, I’m still glad I solved it. They were all fine I guess, but no great ones, which all the ones above this have.

Another issue with this case is that, for the first part of a 2-parter, it doesn’t feel like it sets anything up. And that’s because it hardly does. It’s a great case in its own right, but I didn’t want to revisit a single character from this scenario in the future, which for the first of a 2-parter is a huge let down.

I also think the artists studio is one of my least favourite 1900 AR scenes. It was just there and didn’t feel relevant enough to be shown and was only there because all the cases have to have 2 AR scenes, it could have been cut and cost nothing.

Overall, I didn’t love this case for 1900, which puts it extremely high in the list, because the 1900 set is great. So, y’know pretty good!

Oh yeah, almost forgot, the single moment that made me laugh the most across ANY of the scenarios was at the final questions where they asked me who the mysterious stalker was. I had NEVER heard them mentioned at any moment and will never look it up out of respect for the case. But it’s just really funny to have a last question and just go “I have so little to go on it could be literally anyone in the case.” This was obviously great, and screamed of my favourite aspect of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective: the secondary questions at the end. I don’t care if I accurately worked out who committed the elaborate murder, I care about whether I found out who overfed the cat! Guve me that bullshit any day! And I’m a tad annoyed that I missed this subplot, but missing it probably added a lot to my enjoyment of the case, because who cares if something is objectively good or bad, it’s all about vibes my friend! And in this case they were SOLID.

5) 2400: Dream That Never Ends

This case is what I wanted all of the 2400 cases to be like. It’s a regular crime (thank God) but with a lot of important sci-fi fuckery happening beneath the surface that informs everything that’s happening. Too many of the cases are just “there’s a crime in the future and people are online” which is fine and all, but this is the only case that felt like it made the most of the setting.

The setup for the case is also loads of fun, investigating a race crash without a corpse is a really cool scenario to be explored, and I think a lot is done with it. I really enjoyed all of the behind the scenes scheming from the teams, I’m a big fan of Formula 1 and it was nice to see some petty rivalries here, even if it’s more of a backdrop than integral to the case itself. Because this case is something that we haven’t seen much in the 2400 set, and that’s a personal drama at its core.

This is a case which is about characters dealing with grief, mortality, morality, and petty feuds about sky bike races. This is the stuff I LOVE in my crime stories, because it makes the characters real in a way which they wouldn’t otherwise be. The fate of character 44 is one of the true tragedies in the game, and it’s really interesting to see it explored here. The lack of a traditional “villain” here also adds an interesting twist to the case which makes it feel very different to the others.

You might be surprised I’m as high in a case that’s serious like this as I am, previously in this article I’ve gone on about how I never take any of the cases seriously and just take the piss and have fun. And that’s because under this serious attire we have some INCREDIBLY silly sci-fi stuff going on. And also a rival raver who HATES her competition so much I can’t tell if she wants to kill or fuck her is someone I couldn’t get enough of. Every case should have characters like this.

If I have one criticism with the case it’s that I cottoned onto what was going on too quickly. Now, sure, that’s because I’m familiar with the tropes of the genre, but in this situation the resolution was cool enough that I don’t mind that I was one step ahead of the game. I realised where it was going and I thought “man that’s sick as hell” and stopped caring.

This was the last case I played in the 2400 setting (outside of a matter of time, which doesn’t count) and I left going, “I want to see more of this!” And frankly, when you’re playing your 17th scenario in a month, that’s a ringing endorsement that it did something right. I had a great time with this case, and in most ways I think it’s the best 2400 case, but it’s not the highest on the list because I like the other one more than this for stupid fucking reasons. Go me!

4) 1900: A Ray of Hope

This is probably the most puzzle heavy case of any in the millennium series, and I’ve been fairly low on the puzzles so far in this ranking. Is this case so high because they’re all good? OF COURSE NOT DUMB DUMBS! Sure, they’re probably the best selection of the lot, but they’re all mediocre at best. The items on the table puzzle is annoying and gives an answer which is barely a word, the one about used to find the location of interest is a neat idea but decidedly outside the scope of everything else in the set, and the perspective puzzle was a neat trick but without much else to it and would never work in real life. HOWEVER, I really like the puzzles in this case because of the purpose they serve the narrative.

One of my favourite tropes as an avid Nancy Drew fan and former Escape Room designer is a madman who likes setting challenges for people. Do they exist in real life? No! Do they fill a neat hole in a narrative to make otherwise non-diagetic puzzles have a narrative place in something; of course they do! No, I won’t explain what non-diagetic means, look it up! But the challenge of this case, and the main thing I’ll remember about it, is finding the identity of this madman and working out their motives. One of my favourite moments across all the cases came near the end of this one when I suddenly realised I, the player, had been played for the fool just as much as the character I was playing as. And I LOVED it, I was genuinely disappointed in myself, and any board game that can bring real emotion merits it as a win in my books! This whole section of the case was great!

Luckily, the rest of the case was fun too! Looking into a theft, while less cool than murder, was a fun case to solve. If a tad too easy, determining who had the radium, but I guess that needed to be established so that the whole scheme made sense. I also appreciate how once the motive of the crime comes into play, everything else slots into place logically around it.

The cast felt sprawling, but all relevant, or potentially relevant at least. The subplot in this one was one of my favourites and subverted the tropes presented in interesting ways, and the red herring it produced felt fair and did throw me for a loop for a few seconds before I worked out what was going on. Like, overall the case was just fun!

But onto the elephant in the room; Marie Curie’s inclusiong in this case is odd to say the least. I tend not to like it when real historical figures make appearances in my fictional media (except in Doctor Who, that shit slaps). She’s also an interesting historical figure because obviously her discoveries led to the unintended deaths of a lot of people. And this scenario sort of comments on that a bit, which I found odd, as I assumed it would mostly be about her discoveries and not the long term implications of them. But Marie Curie is a historical figure I think about a fair bit, and that’s because of Marie Curie: The Musical. (Dear reader, if you don’t care about me ranting about Marie Curie: The Musical feel free to skip the next section, however if you do, know I will never fucking forgive you, SWINE!)

Now, I may shock you when I say that Marie Curie: The Musical is not very good. Sure, you would think the translation of a South Korean musical about a Polish scientist would be the greatest thing ever made, but you would be wrong. Perhaps something is lost in translation, as it’s really quite hard to make the word Chlamidiya rhyme with something in English without seeming silly, but gosh darn did they try their best to do that anyway! I also enjoyed how the musical was like “We need to humanise Marie a little, let’s give her a friend!” and then proceeded to make Marie seem far far worse because now all the stuff that’s happening to strangers is happening to a close friend of hers and she still doesn’t do shit to stop it. She also probably spent more time in the show cradling a jar of dirt than she ever did in real life, but maybe Marie was a big ol’ dirt fan and I never knew. But I think the most damning thing about the show is that I, man who loves all the worst musicals and can remember songs from pretty much every musical I’ve seen, can only remember the Chlamidiya line from this one, which will somehow be worse than you could imagine if you ever somehow do see it. Which I doubt, because how the fuck was it put on even once, let alone twice!

Anyway, she barely figured in the case and doesn’t add or subtract from my enjoyment of it. This case is just good!

3) 2400: The Lament for Orpheus

And so the last of the 2400 cases falls, and despite being at the top of my list, oh boy, does this case have a lot of flaws!

The AR scenes are particularly cluttered and it’s hard to discern anything of note in this one without the implant which tells you exactly where everything is, which feels like a waste of time and too easy simultaneously. Speaking of ease, it feels far too easy to find the identity of The Faceless and therefore work out what’s going on. Now sure, this is mostly because there is a distinct lack of Red Herrings here, as almost all the cast have featured in the previous case(s). Like, seriously, you couldn’t have it be between even a couple of people, you have enough cards! The tone is also tonally inconsistent, where it’s trying to be a dark fable where truly awful shit is going on, but it’s also dumb as fuck at points. People are massacred and you don’t really care that much.

Ok, now I’ve said the negatives, time to talk about why I REALLY like this case! I know I said the tonal dissonance was bad, but I really like how stupid it gets at points. You can spend a long time talking to a robot called Killbot 420 and that is FUNNY. I also like how over the top the whole story is, even if it makes the dark undertones difficult to take seriously. I also love how seriously the assassins take themselves when talking about magic swords that can cut through anything. It’s so fucking camp!

But mostly where this case shines is acting as a sequel to the previous two cases in the trilogy. This case feels like a finale, and it ties in enough of the loose threads in the previous two cases and expands on them in ways that make sense. Every time I met a character who had previously appeared I was pleased, and always like “Yeah, I remember you, the dickhead!” and they’re still a dickhead but a little different and it’s great! I think I enjoyed every returning character, my only complaint being that I wish one of them had been the villain of the piece… but that’s a minor complaint.

Honestly, the main reason I like this case is because of how much I understood what was going on because I’d already spent time with these characters in this world. And I’d like to shout out one character in particular. It’s my BOY Mr. Smith! Like, seriously, I’ve no idea what it is about him, but he’s great! So simultaneously cool and pathetic, what a COMBO. And the main reason I like him is because of his small appearance in the previous case. Him going from confident agent, to questioning his own guilt, to nearly getting killed, to becoming a leader rising against oppression, it’s a really nice arc. I wish he’d been in the first part so it’s spread out a little more, but it’s still good!

This is also the only case where I actually enjoy using the optical implant. Determining the identity of the faceless is the only time this mechanic is used for anything interesting at all. Every other appearance its whole function is simply to scan the person you obviously need to scan to gain access to something. In this one at least there’s some questioning if you have the right person, so kudos to that!

Anyway, this is an OK case massively improved by being a satisfying ending to a trilogy I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings on. But I had a blast playing it and thus it is more than the sum of its parts. It really made me want to see more series of cases and less standalone cases in Chronicles of Crime. Being able to build a rapport and understanding of the characters is cool and I think that almost all of the cases would benefit from that.

2) 1900: A Bitter Pill:

This case feels so different to almost all of the others, despite being a very simple case in of itself. And that’s because of how the case introduces itself to you. One of the normal things when playing a Chronicles of Crimes case is that you discover new locations bit by bit as you explore and discover new things. NOT IN THIS ONE BABY! HERE’S EVERY LOCATION 5 MINUTES IN MOTHERFUCKERS! HAVE FUN PRIORITISING WHERE TO START DICKHEADS! But real talk, I really enjoyed this. I had to think really hard in the early game about who I wanted to talk to the most at any point.

The beginning of chronicles of crime cases can sometimes feel a bit like going from location A to location B in order as they’re revealed one by one in order. (This example is of course impossible because location B is on the back of location A and never those two locations shall meet. Like doomed lovers, always so close to each other, yet damned by fate to be apart! Such tragedy is seldom seen on this fair Earth…) It can sometimes feel a little like the beginning of the case is playing itself more than you are playing it, and it was this case that made me realise I kind of don’t love that. But seeing as this was also the penultimate scenario I played and I had never noticed at any point previously, I don’t think I’ve ever minded too much. But it also made me really really enjoy the beginning of this case.

The main gist of this case is fairly obvious, at least to me, from the get go. Determining the parentage of a child was genuinely a fun challenge, and it helped that I met one of the big candidates as literally the final character I met, which made me rethink everything I thought I knew. And even once I had worked it out, the matter of who did it still wasn’t immediately obvious and needed some reasoning. In fact, I only figured out who did it in the last 5 minutes of playtime, and that moment of everything slotting together was great. And finishing on that high meant that I was always going to be higher on it than I otherwise may have been (even if I would have really liked it regardless).

I also have to shout out the locker puzzle for being my favourite of all of them. Not for the use of the eiffel tower meeple (I saw it coming a mile away) but for having an “O” in a name represent a 0. That’s the kind of shit I absolutely live for. Little changes that make something go from boring to interesting like THAT. And it was still nice to use the key in an interesting way.

The clock puzzle was dumb as hell and didn’t make a lick of sense from any stand point, in universe or out of universe, and required a very easy to miss piece of evidence to solve. I also really liked this puzzle though, it was so bad I couldn’t appreciate how ostentatious it was. Also, on the matter of all these fucking locked boxes in these cases, can’t I just smash them? Why do I need to find a code? Grab a brick and go to town, baby!

This case was a great final traditional case for me to tackle. It was genuinely tricky without it ever feeling unfair. The tricks on display were interesting, and I just had a blast throughout.

1) 1900: Captured in the Frame

People say that you need something to be well rounded for it to be truly great. They say it requires everything to slot together perfectly to be an enjoyable experience. I think these people who I made up just now and don’t really exist are fucking idiots. One single fantastic moment can be supported by an adequate framework and it’ll still be great! And my single favourite moment from across all the cases was in this case when I realised what was going on. Like, it was SO DUMB that I couldn’t help but appreciate the audacity of it! It didn’t matter how good the rest of the case was, that one moment was always going to be the one I cared most about.

If I have any small criticism with the Millenium Series is that there’s a lack of “Aha” moments, which is an escape room/puzzle term for describing the moment of elation when you work something out. Sure, there’s a fair few of them, but preferably you want almost every case to have one. You’re playing as a detective, you have to think like one! And sometimes they’re undone a bit by having characters simply tell you what the “Aha” moment is… Which also happens in this case, but close enough to the end that you really should have worked it out already, so it’s fine! This whole set piece where everything is confirmed is also incredibly fun and the right level of silly.

I know I said only an adequate framework was needed to bolster a moment like this, but luckily the rest of the case is great too! Seemingly unconnected cases actually being connected is my FAVOURITE trope, especially when how they’re connected makes sense, which is the case here. And investigating both felt consistently enjoyable and never like one was the afterthought compared to the other.

Everyone acts in a rational way, revealing the truth when it makes sense to and not pointlessly denying things, and even coming forward themselves about info when needed. The whole cast was actually quite well defined and I fully understood all their motives.

Also, big shout out to corrupt cops working for the people in power! What absolute fucking KINGS! Take that blood money and run baby! I’m surprised this happened even once across all these cases though, so unlike reality, and for it to happen more than once would be absolutely astronomical odds!

But do you know who is also a cop, not corrupt, but still an absolute LAD? It’s your dickhead uncle baaabbbyy! And he is at his absolute BEST in this case. He is a man on a mission, determined to hunt down someone I can only imagine him calling “The Napoleon of crime” as he hugs a photo of them close to his chest as he sleeps. He is absolutely OBSESSED in this case and it is so entertaining. Every conversation just ties back to how much he wants to catch this guy. You could be talking about the weather and he’d be like “That bastard loves sunny days, but that sun isn’t bright enough to illuminate his cold dead heart” and I’m there just eating it up. I would literally die for this man, he’s so so good!

I just loved this case! It was easy, it was fun, it had great moments, and it had some great characters. What more could you want?

***

And that is the end of that. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, as I have genuinely enjoyed writing it even if it’s gotten away from me at a few points. But overall I had a great time playing these games! All of them had their charms, and only one case I disliked out of the bunch is a really good batting average! Good on you Lucky Duck, you’ve made a FANTASTIC game!

And so it comes to an end, as all things must, and I think there’s one message we can all agree on at the end here. PLEASE GIVE ME THE BOARD GAME FOR FREE! PLEASE! I’m not above begging! I’m begging now! Please! Sure, I may have written this anyway, but writing this and ALSO getting some tasty tasty free stuff would be good! Like, come on! This is so long! That must mean it’s good right?

But real talk, thanks for reading, I know I probably won’t get anything out of this because I’m releasing this ~24 hours before the deadline of the Kickstarter, but if even one person reads and enjoys this I’ll be happy.

But yeah, pay up Ducky Luck games, I want to solve some more crimes!

Warning, this review contains swearing and spoilers for the Key 2 Time trilogy. I’m also gonna spoil my review right now and say that the trilogy fucking sucks.

***

When I first found out that Big Finish were making trilogies of Doctor Who stories in their monthly range I was thrilled. I thought that this would open up a whole new avenue of storytelling by allowing overarching themes and ideas to be explored in ways which hadn’t previously been possible. And the first one they were doing was a sequel to the Key to Time, one of the only real arcs in Classic Who. My expectations were high and I was excited to listen to it as soon as I could!

At this point ten years pass.

You see, I was a teenager in 2009 and too poor to buy Doctor Who audios recklessly back then. But by the time I went to uni and had a bit more disposable income, oh boy, had my hype for the trilogy died down! I’d read enough reviews from people saying it was bad/mediocre that I spent my money on other things instead. And then I got a job and had money so I could afford it! But then I stopped caring about Big Finish so I didn’t buy it then either. At this point a bunch more time passed, when out of nowhere I remembered that the Key 2 Time trilogy existed and decided that *surely* it couldn’t be as bad as people said it was. In conclusion: I did eventually buy the trilogy and, oh boy, was it absolutely not worth the wait.

Looking back, I now see that one of the reasons Big Finish introduced the loose ‘trilogies’ in the main range (or I guess the monthly adventures as they are now called) was because it was easier to schedule the same group of people to be free at the same time, and therefore it made sense from an organisational standpoint to have a few stories back to back with a similar cast. But the Key 2 Time trilogy showed they were clearly thinking about what they could do with this new format, and while the Key 2 Time trilogy has a lot of… objectively terrible stuff about it, it has a lot more ambition than most of the other trilogies I’ve listened to. It’s clearly trying to be a big epic adventure to justify the trilogy format, and for that I give it kudos, but it very rarely succeeds in what it is trying to do.

Before we get to the review proper I must admit that I have relistened to The Key 2 Time trilogy exactly once in preparation of writing this article, so understand that any inaccuracies in this review arise because this is extremely poorly researched as I could not be bothered to spend even thirty seconds fact checking. If you notice a problem or mistake I make, please do tell me how and why I’m wrong, feedback is always appreciated. Although you must understand that doing this will ruin my day and make me cry a lot, which may come as a pro or a con depending how twisted you happen to be as a person, but you do you man.

***

First things first, the elephant in the room. “Key 2 Time” is one of the worst titles of anything I’ve ever heard. Clearly taking inspiration from the Fast and Furious films it decided to throw subtlety out the window and just go for the first name someone thought of on a coffee break. It wasn’t a clever title when it was released, and if anything, it has somehow gotten worse over the years. In terms of design, the styling of the 2 being so much larger than the other words in the logo also makes it look terrible iconographically. It is truly one of the most abysmal attempts at naming and branding something I have ever seen.

And I for one LOVE IT.

Whenever I think of the name ‘Key 2 Time’ I cringe a little internally, and with how jaded and dead to the world I have become over the many years of my continued existence, having any kind of emotional response to something as mundane as a name is a veritable treat!

I’m also a sucker for any homophone which requires additional clarification. If someone said “I really like the Key to Time” you would have no idea whether they were talking about the TV season or the audio trilogy. I mean, sure, no-one with taste would ever say that about the Key 2 Time, but you can never account for the terrible terrible opinions people have. If I was ever having a verbal conversation about this series I’d have to say “I really dislike the Key 2 Time; where the 2 in the middle is the number 2 and not the word ‘to’.” To which the response would presumably be “But isn’t two also a word” and then I would respond “Well, yeah, it is, but in this title it’s specifically the number 2, not the word ‘two’ so I had to specify as such.” This would all have been avoided if they’d instead called it 2 Key 2 Time, then no-one would get confused. Anyway, the title is terrible, but it makes me chuckle every time I see it, so it is much more of a plus than a minus. This is one of the only positive things I will say in this review.

***

This story takes place in one of my all time favourite eras of Doctor Who. That of course being the “The Fifth Doctor has a very rigid series of companions who he was travelling with at any point, and he never travelled alone, so we have to absolutely fuck with the canon to get a Fifth Doctor story where he travels with X companion(s) in such a way which barely makes any sense if you spend more than a second thinking about it” era.

There is a bit at the beginning of this trilogy where the Doctor shouts “Peri!” to establish where he is in his own personal history, and I find this scene very funny. Like, it’s about as unsubtle as you can get, and I think may genuinely be The Doctor’s opening line. Big Finish knew how much we (the wonderfully rabid fans) would complain were it not explained, and the blazened lack of subtlety in explaining it immediately amuses me greatly.

Speaking of Peter Davison, he’s never been my favourite Big Finish Doctor, as often his performances come off as him seeming a little uninterested and show a lack of understanding of the material he’s performing. This is probably because Peter mostly does Big Finish audios to make money and has gone on record saying he shows up without reading the scripts beforehand, says his lines, then leaves. As a fan of Doctor Who, this is of course disappointing; I would love it if he put as much effort into them as he could, as it would only improve the quality of the work he makes. But writing as someone who has to earn money in order to live, I say do as little work as possible King! Min-max the shit out of your job and get paid anyway. What are Big Finish gonna do, fire you and replace you? Jokes on them, they can’t! Playing The Doctor is a gig for life baby! Do fuck all, take the money and run I say! But anyway, I would describe his performance in this trilogy as slightly above average for him, so that’s nice.

***

Amy (not to be confused with Amy Pond) is the companion they introduce in this trilogy. And, unlike most of the other things about this trilogy, I do not have any hugely strong opinions on her. Clara Janson is a fine actress and performs her role consistently  well, but the character she plays is much more interesting in theory than in execution (an absolute CLASSIC trope for this trilogy, it will happen again MANY times).

My main issue with Amy comes from her development; Amy is supposed to start off as a blank slate, and learns from the people she’s with as the stories progress. However, by the end of part one of the first story in the trilogy, she has already cemented herself as a naive but good person. It should take her much longer to become the good person she’s trying to be. We have a trilogy of stories for Christ’s sake, we have room for a little character development between them, but nooooo, let’s get that pesky character growth out of the way before it gets started. But the naive part of her character I actually really enjoy. I think Clara pulls it off well and it lead to some interesting situations and character interactions for Amy, making her feel different from almost all other Doctor Who companions. 

The first story’s climax hinges on Zara (Amy’s sister) trying to convince Amy to use her powers with ill intentions. This could be very effective if we’d already seen Amy struggle with understanding what morals exactly are, witnessing death from an outside perspective and being cold about the whole thing, but she realises after spending time with the Doctor she has a better understanding of what is right and what is wrong, and can make decisions for herself. Obviously none of that happens. Amy becomes good immediately and there was never a moment in the trilogy where you don’t doubt her to do exactly the right thing. This does wonders for the end of the story. And by wonders, I mean it makes me wonder why I’m wasting my time listening to this. But don’t worry, I then wrote seven-thousand words about it, so clearly wasting time is a hobby of mine.

Amy could have been a fascinating case study over the three stories where we see her personality change and develop, but of course that doesn’t happen. And the character we’re left with is… nice. She’s smart and self sufficient, but she hardly feels that different from other Who companions. She’s fine, but at least in this trilogy, she didn’t do loads to win me over.

Zara, on paper, is a much more interesting character than Amy is. She has a lot of the character growth that would usually be seen in a main character, and not a side one. She begins by focussing on her darker urges, before coming to the realisation that she might want to be a good person. The end of her arc is a bit of a whimper though, as The Doctor just says “You’re a good person” with very little evidence to back it up, then they all leave. Taking into account at this point her manipulations and actions have affected the lives of millions of people, and lead to the deaths of many, this is not a hugely satisfying conclusion. Another big  issue with her character growth is because her becoming good is tied to her falling in love, which is a stupid trope and I hate it. Let evil people be in love too damn it!

I really enjoyed most of Zara’s appearances in the Judgement of Isskar, she presents an interesting mirror to Amy, and while you already know she’ll be redeemed (this is Doctor Who after all) you’re left curious as to how it’s going to come about. And that’s explored really well in the next story!

Oh wait, never mind, Zara doesn’t appear in the Destroyer of Delights at fucking all. Like, I know that Amy is technically the companion in the trilogy, but The Key 2 Time is very much Amy and Zara’s story. And then Zara just isn’t there for a third of it. This means she has to have a lot of off screen character development between the first and last stories, and off screen development is the best of them all, because then at least then you can’t have proof that it was done badly. The most frustrating part is that all you need in the Destroyer of Delights is her being involved in a minor way, either by working for the White Guardian or again competing for the fifth segment. It doesn’t need to be a big part, she literally only needed to be there. Maybe she wasn’t free for those dates, but still, it’s a let down to her character.

The reason this happened is probably because a lot of Zara’s character development came from a Companions Chronicles story, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is separate from the trilogy and I haven’t listened to it. It might be good, might be shit, I have no clue. However YOU (yes, you reading this right now) could change that! If you pay me a whole £2.99 I will take that money and spend it on a digital copy of The Prisoner’s Dilemma. I will then add an addendum to the end of the article which will read as follows: “You buffoon, you fool, what a waste of your hard earned cash. Imagine giving me money to write this. And yet if this has been added it means someone did. I hope you enjoyed using your money to waste an hour of my precious life which I used to listen to The Prisoner’s Dilemma instead of doing something I actually wanted to do. I thought the story was good/bad. I have nothing more to say. What an absolute waste of my time and your money.” where I will delete good or bad as appropriate, but nothing else will change.

Anyway, speaking of Amy and Zara, why do both Tracers become specifically human beings at the end of the story? I’m sure there’s some explanation in the canon, hell probably more than one knowing Doctor Who, but my knowledge is not so in depth that I could name it off the top of my head. You could literally just say they’re becoming mortal and that would be better as it would actually make sense. Amy spends some time with humans in episode two, but other than that they spend most of their time around other species, so why are they becoming human? It would make way more sense for Amy to become Gallifreyan instead of human. But she doesn’t and I just have to live with being mildly annoyed by this, truly a fate worse than death.

Even when Amy leaves we get the usual writing off of a companion by having them leave the Doctor to chill on Gallifrey because that place seems so Goddamn cool, despite all the evidence that shows it is, in fact, a boring shithole. So when Amy and Zara become human at the end of the trilogy it feels like an excuse to write them out and nothing more. And you could have made Zara Atrion and it would also have made sense, she fell in love with one after all. On that note, Zara falling in love with a rando and leaving is yet another classic companion leaving trope, so I’m glad they managed to include two in a single story. Aren’t we lucky?

Oh, also, Amy and Zara sounded very similar. I often couldn’t tell which of the two was talking outside of (very obvious) context clues. Although in the Chaos Pool where Zara was pretending to be Amy I am genuinely unsure which actress was speaking at which points. But that is almost certainly a skill issue on my part. However, I will still hold this against the trilogy as a whole too! Hire people who I personally think sound more distinct in the future, punks!

***

There is a lot of focus on the Black and White Guardians in this story. I think the interpretation of them being old and petty Gods, out for their own personal goals instead of the best interests of the Universe, is an interesting one. It does, however, contradict the canon a bit. But let’s be real, it’s Doctor Who, Tegan deciding she wanted to go to a chippy and get haddock instead of cod would probably contradict at least three different novels and an unofficial audio drama. The canon is a mess, and it’s one of the reasons I love the show.

I really enjoyed The Guardians’ inclusions in the trilogy. I find both the characters fun, and they have good banter with each other as well as The Doctor. The scene with them playing Bridge near the end of The Chaos Pool was a particular highlight, with some very good lines and I enjoyed how they did not seem to care that the universe was ending. All the scenes where they are directly interacting is a fun time, and they spend a lot of time apart from each other so these scenes retain a special feeling throughout.

They did both lack a little development though. I’d have liked to see The White Guardian as having more of a personality than just a rules stickler, and for the Black Guardian I think I needed to see a little more of his chaos. But for minor antagonists they have more than enough characterisation. I was happy to see their inclusion here and genuinely enjoyed them in the trilogy.

Oh yeah, The Grace are in this trilogy too and also elder god things. I don’t care about them so this is literally all I’m gonna write about them.

***

The Judgement of Isskar does a couple of pretty unforgivable things right off the bat. First, and most importantly, its name is far too similar to the infinitely better Big Finish audio ‘The Justice of Jalxar’ and I genuinely wrote that title instead of the correct one when I started writing this section. Like, it doesn’t even have the alliteration to make it memorable! And the titular Isskar isn’t even that interesting, which ties into my second main problem about this story, it’s boooooooring.

(I will add that usually I would add an abbreviation for the stories I am writing about so I wouldn’t have to write “The Judgement of Isskar” so many times, but I worry having JOI written dozens of times in an article would potentially lead to some misconceptions, so I have instead elected not to do that.)

So many ice warrior stories seem to end up being melodramatic space opera bore-fests where nothing happens. This story is no exception. Although, to its credit, with a concept of “what if the ice warriors used to be nice and friendly” this doesn’t come as a surprise, so at least my expectations were leveled early. Sure, maybe seeing the slow progress of how a culture changes over the years could be fun, or perhaps really focussing on a single defining event that forced that change could have been interesting. But noooope, the first idea is not explored at all and the second mostly happens off screen. Instead we get to see the Doctor and Amy get offered wares for free and then politely refuse the offers. How fun. (This was sarcastic, it was not at all fun.) There isn’t enough of a conflict here as the Ice Warriors are so initially pleasant, even when things go wrong it feels like The Doctor could probably go “I’m very sorry” and sort all of his issues out. This section of the story also suffers as there is only one proper character introduced here, the titular Isskar, and he is as boring as the place he lives.

Isskar presents a lot of interesting ideas, but he lacks conviction in everything he does, changing his mind far too easily on a series of whims seemingly multiple times an episode. This is literally his whole character arc: “I hate the Doctor and Amy because they destroyed my home.” “No we didn’t.” “Ah yeah, you right, that cool, I was tricked by Zara, that won’t happen again.” *It happens again* “Well at least I can sacrifice myself for the Doctor who I no longer hate” and then he can’t even do that right! He just fucks off!

Isskar isn’t the driving force of this story, Zara is; Isskar is just there. Nicholas Briggs does a decent turn as the character, stretching his non-Dalek muscles for a change, but it’s hard to make a character like him compelling. Like, at this point I’ve listened to this story three times and I’ve always forgotten who Isskar is. He isn’t important, but he does insist on being present for the whole story, and the story suffers for it.

The only thing I do like about Isskar is how when he inexplicably turns up a thousand years later than when he met the Doctor and Amy they seemingly don’t care at all. The Doctor just goes “oh you must have been put in cryosleep” and immediately moves on with whatever he was doing. Yeah, it makes sense for a time traveller to react like that, but it’s also funny that the Doc ain’t shocked even for a moment. This is the second time he’s met Isskar and he’s already thoroughly done with his bullshit. Which, to be fair, is a vibe.

Luckily the Doctor and Amy are only on Mars for an episode and a bit, but even that is too much. Mars never felt like a living breathing place, it felt like we saw everything they wanted to say about it in a handful of scenes. It is at least a short visit, and the story would need to be dramatically restructured if they wanted it to be any shorter, but it still outstayed its welcome.

Unfortunately the location they replace it with is equally uninteresting. Safeplace, so named because it is a place… that is safe, feels almost as undeveloped as Mars. We do spend a few eps in Safeplace though, so it at least introduces more than one character, which is not something Mars can claim to do. Plus, we are introduced to the first of many comedy aliens in this trilogy, and just like all the other comedy aliens in this trilogy, they decide to make the bold creative choice of having them not be funny at all.

Comedy is very subjective, and what one person finds funny another person may not. So, if any of you think any of this trilogy is funny, know that I think less of you for being stupid and wrong, but you’re free to think whatever dumb shit you want. There is a lot of comedy presented in this trilogy. The Valdigians in The Judgement of Isskar, pretty much all of The Destroyers of Delight, and the Teuthoidians in The Chaos Pool. It does tie the trilogy together thematically at least, and I quite like the, perhaps intended, juxtaposition of comedy with the stakes of the end of the Universe. But then I think that’s handled much better in stories like The Fourth Wall or The One Doctor.

For my own personal taste the comedy would be far more effective here if it lessened more as the trilogy went on, with the first story being a fun romp and the finale dropping the lighthearted tone and having big emotional stakes, as I believe this and would emphasise how serious the stakes were. Killing off the comic relief is also a very effective way of showing that shit got real. This is not what is done at all. It lacks intentionality, the comedy in this trilogy is incidental, which is fine if it’s funny enough, but it isn’t. My main issue is something interesting could have been attempted here with the comedy, but instead they tried to be funny and then failed.

Anyway, the comedy aliens have a silly monarchy. Isn’t that funny? (The answer is no, it is not.) I don’t really have too much to say about the Valdigians otherwise.

My main feeling when thinking about the Judgement of Isskar is apathy. There’s a war in this story, but it’s so poorly directed that you don’t always understand what’s going on, and it lacks stakes because every major character is just kind of meh so the threat never feels substantial. Even when Amy’s being tortured (which the Doc forgives waaaaay too easily for the record) it never feels like the danger is real. Lots of creatures are dying, but it never seems like it’s about the characters we’ve been introduced to, so why would I care?

If it wasn’t obvious, I didn’t enjoy the Judgement Of Isskar very much. It’s my least favourite of the three stories in the trilogy, as it is dull as dirt and the other two are at least entertaining. Everything in The Judgement of Isskar is done better in other Doctor Who stories, and it exists without anything really happening, before abruptly ending. Just like this section of the article. 

***

The Destroyer of Delights is probably my favourite story of the trilogy. That is not to imply it is great, if I had to describe it in a word it would be ‘passable’. It’s a fun enough romp with some of the worst music in any Big Finish story I’ve ever heard. Every five minutes the music just goes BWAH BWAH BWAH (which is also the sound I make when I was forcing myself to listen to this trilogy, but that was slightly less annoying because making funny sounds yourself is far superior to having to listen to someone else make them) and it would take me out of story it was so distracting.

The Destroyer of Delights is meant to be funny. However, in stark contrast to the rest of the comedy in the trilogy, it actually succeeds! Oh wait, sorry, I mistyped, it didn’t succeed at all. Despite this, the story moves along at enough of a pace that it at least kept my interest throughout. While lacking interesting twists and turns, the story it tells is cohesive and is kept entertaining by the conflict between the White and Black Guardians. This story also probably has the strongest appearance of Amy as a character as she is separated from the Doctor and has to work independently, giving her more moments to shine, and it does pose some interesting questions about Amy and The Doctor’s relationship. Luckily Big Finish decided to quickly ignore those ideas and nothing comes of them. But at least it tried to ask the question!

For those wondering why this story is called The Destroyer of Delights (which, for the record, is a really fun name) it’s because it is said approximately fifteen times an episode, and gets old very quickly. In Sudan at the time this story is set you were not meant to speak their word for death aloud, so euphemisms were used instead, and one example is ‘The Destroyer of Delights’. With people unable to say the word death, or make direct allusions to it, there should be an almost infinite number of ways to refer to it. But clearly the writer came up with about five then decided “Fuck it, that’ll do!”, and then still used ‘The Destroyer of Delights’ ninety percent of the time. This annoyance could have also easily been avoided by simply cycling through the five phrases a little more, so it’s disappointing to not have seen that done.

Also who talks about death that fucking much??? Every conversation people have in this story is seemingly about death. Like, does it come up that often in everyday conversation. Sure, it’s Doctor Who so there’s a threat, but even then it’s a bit much. Someone could be making an omelette and you can guarantee some prime bellend’s gonna go “The destroyer of delight awaits all” and I’m just like “Damn Dave, I’m just cracking some eggs here.” “A cracked head will only hasten your journey to the destroyer of delights, whose name cannot be spoken” at which point I, personally, would kill the guy just to get him shut the fuck up.

The plot of this story is also a fairly trite one for Doctor Who, as “alien lands in the past and needs to fix their ship” has been done, both before and after, better than it was here. The gold then becoming a piece of the Key to Time is an interesting idea but not enough is made of it. The concept of inadvertently causing the thing you are looking for to come into existence through the act of searching for it could have been used to great effect. It is no shock that very little is made of it and instead the story just ends with the Black and White Guardians going “Oopsie! Silly us!” which was still a fine ending, but I know we could have gotten much better.

This whole trilogy really annoys me because so many of the ideas used are good and there was clearly an intent behind them, but then the execution lets them down. Amy and Zara, the Guardians, the Grace, even the Key not being reformed properly. They could all be more interesting than they are. I know I’ve already mentioned this point several times, but this is the biggest problem with the trilogy. The potential is so good, but the ideas are squandered here, in favour of bad jokes and bureaucracy. The Big Finish Main Range trilogies are often at their most effective when their stories are only loosely tied together, with a focus on similar themes as opposed to an overarching plot. But with this there was an option to try something more, to be bold and ambitious, but then it doesn’t even feel like they tried to do enough. It’s just… disappointing.

And the Black Guardian giving no shits about his son, while in character, feels like it needs to be touched upon more. You’re clearly trying to make him less of a cartoonish villain, and then he just does the most cartoonishly evil thing immediately after. And while that is partly the point, it also feels like trying to take two steps forward and then just backpedalling. 

There’s also too many characters in this story, or at least, there are a fair few characters who seem important, then the Guardians show up and they steal all the screen time the supporting cast otherwise would have had. While this is understandable, as the Guardians are important for the trilogy as a whole, it did lead to The Vizier and Hason turning up for a few scenes in part four and making me go “Why are they here? Why did they not get killed off and save me from having to listen to them? What a waste of my time!” And when you’re saying that about the supporting cast, that is not a good sign.

I do like some things in this story though, one of which being the setting. I didn’t have much knowledge of ninth century Sudan, and learning more about it was genuinely interesting. I love historicals, and this one is set in a neat bit of history that hasn’t really been explored that much in Doctor Who. Sure, I could really do with a bit less of The Doctor going around being like “Slavery here is kind of fine! I’ll do nothing about it and talk about what great hospitality I have personally experienced to someone who is literally forced to be here.” I know The Fifth Doctor can sometimes be a bit too nice, but this is pushing it. Have a go about the way these people are being treated! Do something man! Him doing nothing feels almost out of character for him.

So anyway, this story was slightly less boring than the last one. I liked the setting and the Guardians bickering, but they take away from the rest of the cast. A fine story, and it’s rough when that’s the highlight of the trilogy.

***

The Chaos Pool is a sequel to The Armageddon Factor. This is a bold choice because the Armageddon Factor is utter shite. But I think this actually presents an interesting opportunity, as making a good sequel to a bad original could lead to the original being recontextualised and allowing the positive parts of the original to be better remembered than its negatives. Luckily the chaos pool realises that that’s actually a terrible idea and just decides to also be bad instead.

If you asked me what the titular Chaos Pool was, I would kind of shrug. It’s brought up a lot, but the descriptions as to what it actually is are vague at best. I think it’s where the Key To Time was formed, but the fact that I’m not sure is not a good sign. It is a place of Legend for… reasons. The way it’s described makes it appear as if this were a place that should be important and cool, and to be fair there is a little timey-wimeyness associated with it, but nowhere near enough for being the birthplace of time. Like, outside of ships being replicated, there’s nothing interesting about it.

Oh, wait, there’s one really cool idea, with the Chaos Pool existing at the link between the beginning and end of the universe. This concept FUCKING RULES. Like, there are so many mind fucky things that could come from this. Of course, none of these happen, but that would be expecting too much. Oh wait, no it wouldn’t, it would be expecting exactly what I personally was owed from birth to death. There’s not a single idea explored with the fact that it links the beginning and end of time in any way. Like seriously, just chuck in some stasis pods so you can have people from the future travel to the past, then go into cryosleep and return to the future! You already did this (in a way worse way) with Isskar, why not just have that be foreshadowing? Instead it just turns into two races who didn’t exist at the same time, existing at the same time. This might have been fun if they were popular aliens from the show’s history, but they weren’t. And if I see a single person claiming that either the Atrions or the slug people were popular, I have bad news for you. They are not. But the idea was there at least, so that’s something. And the story does have a single other good idea.

Lalla Ward playing Astra was an inspired and clever choice. You obviously think she’ll be playing Romana as she was in the original serial, and there’s some fun hints early on that she isn’t who you believe, but you’ll probably only pick up on relistens. Unfortunately, Romana’s later appearance is underwhelming at best, and Astra is not an interesting character at all. She has personality in the first part, disappears for most of two episodes, and then sacrifices herself at the end. Thanks Astra, well worth it. She did a lot off screen though, changing the planet from being ruled  by a monarchy to an elected parliament, which is a positive change for the planet, but my God, are they really such suckers that they voted their fucking princess to be president! This was your chance to break the cycle of aristocracy, not to have more of it! If your planet is dumb enough to vote a royal into supreme power you deserve to die young, which is what is happening to the Atrions so clearly proves my point.

Anyway, Romana is fine here, but she isn’t around enough to do anything too fun. And the interactions between her Astra aren’t too interesting either. Her appearance did allow Big Finish to pat themselves on the back in the least subtle way possible when Romana said “Well I’ll never be president“ at which point I presume she winked at the camera. Obviously that couldn’t be shown because it’s an audio adventure, but she could have at least said “I’m winking” so we all knew as well. Or maybe just record the sound of a wink and amplify it to a hideous extent so that it bursts the listener’s eardrums. That would be better, because then I wouldn’t have had to listen to the rest of the story.

One of my least favourite things in this story (where the title for the single worst bit is a hard fought fight from which I am yet to see a clear victor emerge, bloody and victorious) is the part where Zara changes into Amy for a time. This change has no real impact on the plot, and makes the Doctor seem like he doesn’t care about Amy that much as, despite him working out Zara was Amy almost immediately, just chose to say nothing for… reasons. By doing this he only succeeded in putting Amy in danger. He couldn’t even fall back on saying he wanted to get to know Zara better as he’s so concerned with keeping up the charade that he thinks she is Amy that he never finds out anything about her. This part serves no purpose and is bad and I hate it. But in this trilogy, what else is new.

I don’t know what’s going on with the sound mixing the story, but a lot of the time the Teuthoidians are completely unintelligible. At least they never said anything worth listening to, so I lost nothing by barely understanding them. The only other thing I have to mention in regards to the sound design is that the music, while better than in the last two stories, decides to do the most cliche suspenseful string music I’ve ever heard, which when it played genuinely made me burst out laughing mid listen. To be clear, I personally really enjoyed it and it was probably my favourite moment of the story, but it was technically terrible.

I have little to say about the rest of the story. Things just happen in succession until they stop happening. The Doctor destroys the Key, the Black and White Guardians fuck off and something happens to The Grace. Many things happen in the middle, but a lot of them are so poorly directed as to be impossible to understand what they are. Luckily I didn’t care what was going on, so that didn’t affect my listening experience at all either.

I have said a lot of bad things about this story, so you might be wondering if it’s my least favourite of the three to which the answer is: “No, obviously not, I literally said earlier in the article that The Judgment of Isskar was my least favourite, pay attention!” But yeah, while I’d say The Judgment of Isskar is technically better, I definitely enjoyed the Chaos pool more. Was it because I both made and ate a tart while listening to it? Almost certainly, that tart fucking ruled, I am a great baker and that pastry was SHORT. But I also think that this story, while often nonsensical, is rarely boring. And I appreciate the attempt to tie up the things the trilogy set up, even if it wasn’t tackled well. It’s the only story in the trilogy to feature all of Amy, Zara and the Guardians, and this feels like their story, and a lot of the character beats with them are fun. Both Guardians simultaneously saying “Doctor, you will die for this” was as cheesy as it was great. The story is held back by the weight of what it is trying to do, but is entertaining moment to moment, even if it lacks the single central story thread that it sorely needed.

***

The Key 2 Time trilogy attempts to do a lot, and while I think it mostly fails, I cannot help but admire its ambition. With the new trilogy format Big Finish was attempting to do something new and exciting with its first attempt, and I cannot knock them for it. But I also feel you really need, y’know, six stories to do a proper sequel to the Key To Time. Trying to fit in all of the plot with Amy and Zara, and the conflict between the White and Black Guardians, made the stories feel overfilled, while also diminishing the effects of the individual tales that are being told in each part.

The Key 2 Time isn’t good. But it tries, and for that I give it the credit it deserves. This is one of the most ambitious Big Finish Main range trilogies, at least out of the ones I’ve heard, and I’m genuinely interested in listening to the other trilogies to see if I have any interesting thoughts about them. And if I do, I might write about them, or I might not. Let’s see how I feel.

Big Finish is at its best when it’s being ambitious. When it tries things that the TV show doesn’t want to, or can’t, touch upon. There is so much potential in these stories, and while I can’t recommend that you listen to the Key 2 Time trilogy, I hope Big Finish continues to push boundaries in the years to come. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this review, and maybe made you think about an obscure Big Finish trilogy you haven’t listened to in a while. I have also hopefully saved you some time if you were thinking of listening/relistening to it, because long story short, don’t bother.

You may not have heard of me yet, but fear not, for once this ranking has entered the annals of only the finest Arkham Horror: The Card Game articles my inclusion in the zeitgeist will be as pervasive as it is justified. I am a man with only the finest, and hottest, of takes. For too long have I waited in silence as people spout their terrible opinions, and I feel now it is my duty, nay, my privilege to put you in your place. I warn you in advance, this list will turn everything you thought you knew about the Dunwich legacy on its head, so deep is my insight that you will never look at the world the same way again, for my controversial opinions will rock you to your very core. So, let us begin…

8) Undimensioned and Unseen

Saying Undimensioned and Unseen (U&U) isn’t good is just about as cold a take as you can get in Arkham. That’s because it’s an objectively true statement. However, in saying that, it’s nowhere close to being my least favourite scenario. I am still going to absolutely rip into it though.

U&U is one of the only scenarios in Arkham which relies almost solely on a single stat, and in doing so really curtails how much fun a lot of investigators will have with the scenario. If you have low willpower you are less than useless in trying to do any of what actually matters here, and solely exist to help your high willpower brethren in wrecking shit. Assuming the layout of the locations allows them to wreck shit at all. There’s also only so many times I can say “Wow Jacqueline, you’re doing a Fine job” because there is nothing for Winnifred to do before one of the people I’m playing with stuffs as many cards as they can down my throat, letting the laughter from my own jokes turn into chokes as I breathe my last short breaths.

U&U feels like an outlier from the rest of the campaign mechanically. Sometimes it’s good to have a scenario completely change the way you look at a campaign (City of Archives springs to mind here) but I do not feel that is true here. It is one of the few scenarios in The Dunwich Legacy to feature neither The Beyond or Sorcery encounter sets which define a lot of my thoughts when thinking about Dunwich, although it is certainly a threatening encounter set. It doesn’t fit into the campaign structure well, always feeling like It comes out of nowhere and then disappears as quickly as it arrived.

The repercussions of this scenario are also minimal in terms of overall impact, with a handful of doom being added in Where Doom Awaits should things go badly and that’s it. Outside of all the trauma you acquire, both in game and the real emotional trauma you get from being forced to play this scenario.

People will often joke that the best way to play U&U is to just resign immediately and move on straight away to Where Doom Awaits. While this may sometimes be the optimal strategy, these people are cowards and I despise them. But fear not people who always play U&U regardless of how low Willpower their investigator might be, I despise you too, just less than the other lot. However, the fact that this can be the attitude of a lot of the community goes to show that this scenario has some very glaring flaws. Have I ever personally skipped it? No! Is this also the case when I was playing a 1 Willpower investigator (not Diana) true solo with no hope of success? Yeah, I managed to kill a whole one of them before running away, tail between my legs, and I enjoyed the hell out of that kill. Going against the odds and coming out slightly better than you would have otherwise is what Arkham is all about!

Location randomisation is one of my favourite parts of the Dunwich legacy, there is a lot of replayability in seeing which locations will appear and when, however I feel that it is at its worst in U&U. Even with high will power investigators, you are pretty much required to put at least a couple of clues on the Broods if you wish to consistently deal them damage, and then moving the broods to advantageous positions, but that can be near impossible depending on the layout of locations you get.

Of the 6 locations, 3 come with variants where one has a brood moving effect and the other has a placing clues effect, 2 come with two clue placing variants and 1 comes with a clue placing variant or a forced damage condition. This means that there is a one in eight chance you will be unable to manipulate Brood movement in the game. Alternatively, you also have a one in sixteen shot of only having two locations which allow you to place clues on the Broods, with one of these coming from the token pool as opposed to your own so making it doubly annoying. I understand why it was done this way, and a one in sixteen shot isn’t that likely to come up, is it? But then consider, that is usually better odds than drawing the autolose token, and we all know how often that happens. And the one in eight is even more likely to come up! That’s about the same odds as drawing either the elder sign or the auto lose token, so it  basically feels the same odds as the last one… Either of these situations popping up has happened in more than a couple of U&U games I’ve played, and to have an effective game of U&U, brood movement and clue placement are both pretty much essential. Location randomisation is good, but it needs to be more balanced than it is.

But, despite all of this, there’s a lot of things I really like in U&U. This is one of the few Arkham scenarios where the story and the gameplay merge perfectly, primarily in games with a high number of Broods. There is a real sense of hopelessness and desperation in this scenario (and not just because you have to play it) because going up against an invisible unstoppable enemy, only getting more powerful as time goes on, is quintessential Arkham. When this scenario hits it HITS. You against the mythos, doing what you can before you eventually resign, because even in an all mystic campaign this scenario will often prove to be too much.

Never knowing exactly where the most useful locations will be placed, both for moving broods and placing clues, can allow for some really interesting and varied decisions of how best to tackle the Broods. When the planets align and the cosmos is in syzygy this scenario is great, which is something that scenarios like The Devourer Below never are, and this is the reason U&U is far from my least favourite scenario. Pity it is just shit most of the time though, especially in games where Blood on the Altar went badly.

In low Brood games U&U is at best easy and at worst boring. Sure, it’s sometimes nice to absolutely smash a scenario, going against all odds to save the world by the skin of your teeth. It’s another thing entirely to have done so badly in the previous scenario it feels like the game is giving you a patronising pat on the head and saying “Don’t worry kiddo, I’m sure you got it this time.” Which is especially insulting when you, in fact, don’t got it. Because, even at its easiest, Arkham can still absolutely fuck you over in a millisecond. Between this relentless fucking over, you may still have to wait around hoping another Brood can spawn having killed all the other one(s). This is bad design, and just makes you play games like “how many times do you think I can fail investigating this 1 shroud location before something for me to do happens?” For the record, the answer is “A Lot”.

Penalising players for doing well and rewarding players for doing badly is something that is pretty much unique to U&U and Dunwich as a whole, and was thankfully lessened in the later campaigns. This is one of the most obvious signs that Dunwich was a first campaign, checking to see what does and doesn’t work, and this was decidedly something that did not. Plus, it feels harsh on investigators who smashed blood on the altar, and didn’t just choose to then wait around a bit to let their friends get slaughtered so they’d have a couple less Broods to deal with in the next scenario.

But, to give a word to U&U’s credit, in my blind runthrough I really enjoyed it, and a blind runthrough of a campaign is, in a lot of ways, the most important. I had absolutely dropped the ball on Blood on the Altar. (Now, I might try to claim that it was because I was playing true solo with a limited card pool, and it was therefore a hard time, but you must not listen to me as I defend myself. I had done a terrible job deck building and also made nothing but abysmal decisions in game. Their deaths were preventable and I simply did not prevent them. Because I was garbage.) But, after this crashing defeat, it made my comparative victory in U&U all the sweeter. I didn’t smash it, but I did a job I was happy with, and I had a nice time doing it.

U&U is a scenario which suffers the more you play it, you see its faults for what they are and compare it to the rest of what Arkham put out and it does not hold up well. But on a first runthrough of a first campaign, it can be a genuinely pleasant and enjoyable experience, and I think it’s good that I remember that sometimes…

But then I remember my second playthrough of it where I got fucking curb stomped by 4 Broods and I think “Oh yeah, this scenario is garbo” and that’s why it’s in 8th place on the list. Although I still like it, I promise! This scenario is only fun to play some of the time, and I think every other scenario in this campaign is fun to play every time.

7) Where Doom Awaits

Another cold take, I know. The hot takes are coming soon, I promise! I definitely wouldn’t start an article the way I did and then proceed to have the most milquetoast opinion about everything. That would be insane, and only a madman destined to go down in history as both an idiot and a loser would do such a thing! So I promise, the hot takes are just around the corner… probably. But I can’t change my thoughts, and Where Doom Awaits (WDA) is not a scenario I ever really love to play.

WDA is a scenario which scuppered more than a couple of runs for most of you reading this I’m sure. I imagine there’ll be one of you thinking “Wow, you’d have to be really shit to lose the campaign here” and newsflash, yeah, I was, but I’ve also lost it when I was playing well with good decks too! And that’s a positive if you can believe it or not.

Whenever I approach Where Doom Awaits it’s with a feeling of trepidation. I am well aware that this could be the end of the campaign, that a couple of sub-optimal decisions or good ol’ fashioned bad luck could lead to an early finale. Some of you might consider failing a scenario resulting in a campaign loss to be a mistake, but I really like most of the scenarios which do this when they appear. The feeling of dread really adds to the scenario, there is a palpable tension whenever I play it, I am worried about losing because of the price that comes with it.

I think it’s well positioned as a campaign losing scenario. The 7th scenario is a logical place for you to fall down and lose, missing the minimal amount of content if you’re playing as a full campaign. And I have genuinely never replayed this scenario after losing, I’ve just shrugged, cried manly tears at my bitter loss, and moved on with my life. Though the hurt never truly goes… But having any kind of emotional reaction at all is a great sign that the scenario is good. This ending is very in keeping with Arkham, and a lot of what I like about the Arkham Horror Card Game is the whole vibe of it, being Alone Against the Horror (upcoming solo Call of Cthulhu rpg book written by me, release date: Never). And this scenario captures that feeling. Now if only the scenario were good enough to back those feelings up…

WDA is a penultimate scenario and it knows it. It’s clearly trying very hard to set the stage for an epic final confrontation and is determined to throw everything it has at you to prove that. However it is in the fact that it’s throwing everything at you that lets itself down. WDA has one of the most varied encounter decks of any Arkham scenario, and that just leads to the threat feeling… muddled. You are hit in so many different ways that no one of those ways feels like it could kill you on its own. Even the Sorcery encounter set, which is usually terrifying, here just means that (as with most of Dunwich) you probably shouldn’t be playing a draw focussed deck, but the encounter deck probably won’t kill you because of it.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the encounter deck is a whopping 40 cards big (where most scenarios float around the high 20s, low 30s range) which may seem intimidating at first, but when playing true solo, as I usually do, it just makes it incredibly swingy as to whether anything can hit you hard enough on its own to put you in real danger. It’s more likely to have the devastating cards hit you in high player counts, but then you already have the higher player count to help counteract that, and often the same player would need to draw multiple of the same type of effect to be hit really hard. WDA is scary because of what it might do to you, not because of what it actually is. What it is is a higgledy-piggledy collection of threats that looks scary, but when you look closer you realise it is actually just a deck of cards on your table, placed there unominously.

I had not been planning on talking about the Return To variants of these scenarios in this article, as I have a much better understanding of the base scenarios than the altered ones, and yet I feel obliged here to bring up the fact that the Base of the Hill and Ascending Path locations are kind of busted in the game as written, and whenever I play this scenario I swap them out for their return to versions so am considering that in this ranking. By changing this the scenario becomes much better. Not enough to put it any higher up the list, but better nevertheless. But even having to do this is a real issue with the scenario, especially as the return to version of the cards are now potentially going to be unobtainable for new players, leaving them with the original janky version.

One thing I don’t see this scenario getting enough credit for is its use of the agenda cards. For many first time players seeing the doom tracker going up to double digit values seems unthinkable, and is a very effective moment. Sure, nowadays that’s more commonplace, but back when this first came out this made the scenario have a unique feel to it. The epic scale of things coming to ahead. Equally, the use of  flavour text on the Agenda 2 card is very effective, being foreboding and different from what people who had only played the core set before Dunwich would have seen. Sadly, however, this has also suffered a bit in that other scenarios have been released which have better agenda cards, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t still good. But it doesn’t quite hit the same way if you’ve played certain other campaigns before Dunwich.

As far as playing the actual scenario goes, walking up the hill is fine and all, and I understand what they were going for, but it feels like less of a set piece than the designers seem to think it is. Wind howls through the air, rain pelting down onto the soft Earth as our unlikely heroes make their way towards their last stand, a light in the distance atop the hill, where either the world ends or they jump into the void, potentially losing themselves forever… See, really cool, but what it actually feels like is spending ages to get a whopping 2 locations away from where you start. It’s annoyingly anticlimactic for a penultimate scenario, and despite everything else this scenario has going for it (which is not loads anyway) this is a let down.

Overall, do I like WDA? Well yeah, I said I liked U&U and that’s ranked below this one so it only stands to reason that I like all of the scenarios in this campaign. But this is the last of the scenarios in The Dunwich Legacy where I feel I have to put a little asterisk next to it to qualify my opinion, that I like it but it’s deeply flawed. It’s an epic scenario in all but execution, but the idea is there, and sometimes the idea is enough. Not here though, the game has to be good too, obviously. It’s unfortunate that my two least favourite Dunwich scenarios occur back to back as this really holds this campaign back from being one of the greats. I mean sure, I’ve replayed it dozens of times, but if you’re reading this article, let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t?

6) The Miskatonic Museum

If it wasn’t obvious by now, the me having hot takes thing at the start was a lie. My takes are as cold as ice my friend, I was being facetious for the sake of entertainment. You could probably predict a lot of where the rest of this list is going because, oh boy, do I agree with a lot of people. Although, in saying that, even having The Miskatonic Museum (TMM) at number 6 in the list might make it higher than some people were expecting. But this should be no surprise to anyone with taste, seeing as it’s good.

TMM is such an interesting and exciting idea for a scenario, the investigator(s) being hunted down by a single terrifying enemy, which only grows in power the more times you bring it down, returning stronger and larger than before, striking when you least suspect. It could be round any corner, always waiting to get you. Pity the Hunting Horror is more of a pushover than anything else.

I know, I know, it gets more powerful later, but often it never reaches the full extent of its power, and it becoming massive can sometimes make it easier to deal with than otherwise, as now you can move away from the location with impunity and only take a single point of horror and damage. It is not as scary as it needs to be, even at full strength, especially if you’re playing the rules as written.

The Dunwich Legacy has a lot of moments in it where I have to consider the rules as written and the rules as intended. This is early in the series and a lot of the things which later scenarios would properly fix are not present here. For example, saving Francis in The House Always Wins only to have him disappear because one of you was trapped in the building as it collapses even though he was with another investigator who resigned, it doesn’t make sense! And while doing anything else goes against the rules as written, I sometimes just keep him with me because that’s what logically would happen. The way the Hunting Horror works is clearly meant to work in the way implemented in the Return To box, with it always becoming more powerful every time it comes out, and not ignoring the effects on the reverse of the agenda when it advances. This is another situation where I always play with this variant as this was clearly an oversight. But even then the Horror only moves from a non-entity to an annoyance.

The reason some enemies are so deadly in Arkham is because they are not the only ones you are dealing with. An enemy can go from a mild threat to devastating by even a single other enemy being engaged with you at the same time. This is, obviously, not always the case, but the Horror would feel much more threatening if there was something else to back it up, however that would defeat the whole point of the scenario, and I believe maintaining this unique aspect of the scenario is the most important thing. This is the scenario where you’re being hunted by something. But it’s the fear of what it is, of never knowing when it might return, that keeps the scenario interesting. It’s just that the thing hunting you is kind of lame innit.

The encounter deck mostly focuses on one of two things, making sure you lose your cards as quickly as possible so Beyond the Veil can fuck you up, and making the museum/the Hunting Horror itself as threatening. And it works, this is a very thematic encounter set. Why is the Horror in the museum? Who cares, doesn’t matter! The important thing is that it is there and it wants you dead and the encounter deck makes sure that you know that. I know I’ve gone on about the atmosphere of the game a lot, but it’s very important to me, and this scenario genuinely makes you feel like you’re exploring a museum in the dead of the night. That might be because there’s nothing really there and you mostly just stumble around empty halls until you find what you need, which brings us to everyone’s favourite mechanic in all of Arkham. Exploring!

Everyone loves the Explore Mechanic, uncontroversial king that it is with no retconning whatsoever, and this was the design team’s first instance of *exploring* the idea. Yes, I am very funny, thank you for noticing. Anyway, this explore deck doesn’t include any treacheries at any point like The Forgotten Age, stop complaining. Although, honestly, having one of the other locations power up the Hunting Horror automatically could be fun. I tend to really like scenarios with this mechanic, because unlocking random locations is fun and you never know what you’ll find. Unless you’ve played enough that you remember what those locations are, as I have done, but then you just pretend you don’t remember and have fun anyway. In The Forgotten Age, the explore mechanic ties in thematically so well to most of the scenarios it’s in, and that all started here in the humble Miskatonic Museum… Pity it doesn’t make any fucking sense to be included here!

In the jungles of Mexico you need to explore to find the secret ruins that are there. Makes sense, this is a logical use of an explore deck, charting unmapped areas. But do you know what places do have maps? FUCKING MUSEUMS! We could save everyone a lot of time and effort if the Investigators would stop looking for clues and would instead look at the presumably signposted area which said “Necronomicon exhibition” and just went there straight away! “No Daisy, why would we look at the map, that’s a stupid idea, let’s go look at some heads instead”, “Oh yeah, that sounds sick, let’s do that!” Imbeciles! 

Were maps only invented in 1933? Were the people of the 1920s simply walking down the street and going, “If only there were some pictorial image that I could use to navigate, but alas, such an invention is beyond the technology we have today, I shall simply get lost!” I understand that perhaps these are meant to be more exhibitions in the staff areas of the museum, but it certainly seems like some of the exhibition halls are permanent and that these investigators are just buffoons… This is honestly my biggest complaint with the scenario, which might seem insane to some, but I’m right and they should know better. In saying that, I still enjoy exploring the museum mechanically though.

One of the reasons people tend to rank TMM as quite low is due to its ease. This is undeniably one of the easier Arkham scenarios, though calling any Arkham scenario ‘easy’ would be inaccurate, but this is about as close as it gets. But I postulate that that’s because people are playing it wrong. Sure, they might be playing it ‘well’, but playing it well leads to an easy unfun experience, so why do that? I say try and spawn the Hunting Horror as much as possible, make it the biggest of boys. Every time it appears just kill it, shoot it in its smug face and wait for it to pop back in a few turns. “But why kill it? The agenda is about to advance!” Good! That only gives me the opportunity to kill it again!

I play Arkham because I like to feel hopeless, because I’m just so gosh darn great in my regular life I need to experience challenge and loss in a controlled environment. And honestly, in a scenario where the one enemy is meant to be a threat, you don’t cheese it. Let it have its time in the sun and then just kill it anyway because it’s still kind of easy.

Sure, I potentially rank this scenario higher than others because I willingly choose to play sub-optimally, but if I didn’t Ice And Death Part 1 would be completely broken too, so sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Speaking of, we demand a Return to The Edge of The Earth! You could make it soooo much better! Please, Fantasy Flight, hear my calls and make my dreams come true! Or are my dreams destined to die as many times as the miserable Hunting Horror, as I sadly put my hundredth resource token on shadow-spawned… ready to kill it again as required. In saying that, however, I often don’t do this and kill it immediately after the agenda advances to stop it coming back, but I am as fickle as I am right, I will do as I wish.

The burning of the necronomicon choice at the end of the scenario is also a nice moment, the first proper post-scenario choice of the campaign, and it’s in keeping with the theme of Arkham. Do you try for restoring Silas in the long run and take the necronomicon, or do you burn it because burning things is fun and I only wish to see things people worked hard on destroyed? Also the book is evil I guess, but I’d burn it even if it was the world’s only copy of a book describing in detail how to solve all of the planet’s problems. That’d be covered in fire by the time I was done with it!

Anyway, I know I just insulted a lot of this scenario and pointed out a bunch of holes in its design, but I still really enjoy it whenever I play it. Its flaws are lesser than the scenarios lower down in the list. And I always have a fun time when I play it.

5) Extracurricular Activity

Extracurricular Activities (EA) is perhaps my least favourite name of any Arkham scenario I’ve played. Give me the meaningless phrases of The Circle Undone over this shit any day! Like, seriously, doing non-academic stuff at a university. What a spooky idea! Really provokes a sense of dread! (This is sarcastic, it does not.) At least for the House Always Wins (THAW) there’s some sense of darkness behind the name. Extracurricular activities is just a stupid name that isn’t scary and only goes to undermine a mostly good scenario. Like seriously, call it ‘After Hours’, that at least suggests some creepiness. As is, it’s literally just a phrase! Good God. Anyway, I like this scenario, but the name is garbage!

I consider the first two Dunwich scenarios to be very close in terms of quality (which definitely doesn’t give away what the next scenario in the list is going to be) and these have gone back and forth in my head many times as I was writing this. However, at some point you have to observe Schrodinger’s cat and kill it dead, and so EA falls just behind THAW in the rankings today, although tomorrow the cat may be alive and well. Yeah, I know this isn’t how Schrodinger’s cat works, shut up.

I tend to think the scenario is a little easy, but seeing as it is a (potential) first scenario I think it’s fine for it to be on the easier end, and that’s not to say it can’t go horribly wrong. It can and it will. And then, if you do it as a second scenario, even losing a few turns can make it much more difficult.

I think EA really shines in a couple of ways that few other Arkham scenarios do. Firstly, I believe it has one of the most interesting endings of any scenario, mostly because of the openness of it. You are told to try and complete any objective you can find. This is really really cool and I wish more scenarios would do this. Too often Arkham has a tendency to have choices made through text as opposed to through gameplay, and EA is one of the best scenarios in terms of having to actively make these decisions by playing the game.

The first time I played this my mind was blown, determined to find and get every ending, which I have now done. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve reached every resolution across all of the Dunwich campaign at least once. Trying to work out every way in which you can win is an interesting challenge and promotes replayability, which is very useful for a scenario early in a campaign as it is one you will be playing more than others. Both for your inevitable tragic deaths further into the campaign, and for all of the many many times you give up on a campaign because you left it slightly too long between sessions and just restart instead. Or maybe that’s just a me thing. However, the multiple endings you can achieve does make it easier to win this scenario than others, as there are so many different avenues you can follow to complete one of the many objectives.

The other way it excels is in how it introduces the mechanics of the campaign for you. When I think of Beyond the Veil and losing cards and dying horribly because of it, this is the scenario I think of. Both because it’s the earliest scenario in Dunwich to use these features, but also because it’s the one where it most ties in mechanically to what you’re doing (perhaps with the exception of Lost in Time and Space). While you are losing cards from your deck you are also removing cards from the encounter deck. Sure, unlike when this happens in The Circle Undone it doesn’t really help you at all, outside of letting you narrow down what has and hasn’t been drawn from the deck. But who cares, on a surface level you are doing the same thing to the encounter deck as the encounter deck is doing to yours! It’s a neat bit of symmetry and it just gives me a nice warm feeling in my stomach.

This is also one of the few scenarios which introduces an extra features (here the encounter deck milling) and remembers that “Wait a minute, some people play true solo, we should probably account for that” and having this programmed in, as opposed to, for example, the final scenario of Hemlock Vale which goes “Sucks to be you Billy-No-Mates! Time to die, DICKHEAD” before kicking you in the teeth and stealing all of your hard earned money. I have also not actually played the finale of Hemlock Vale, so this may be untrue, but the internet seems to suggest what I’ve said is true, and that’s good enough for me…

So, if I’m mostly saying positive things about this scenario, why is it in the bottom half of the list, the name can’t be the reason can it? You’re right, it can’t. As much as the name is STUPID it doesn’t in any way affect my opinion on the scenario. Look at Undimensioned and Unseen. That name is SICK and it’s at the bottom of the list. I am not a man who is easily swayed, I base all my opinions heavily on facts, logic, and my own personal bias. Mostly the third one. It’s just that I believe all the other scenarios in the campaign have higher highs than this one. This scenario is almost always good, but very rarely great.

If I had to think of a generic Arkham Horror scenario, either this or the Midnight Masks would pop into my head. And that’s what hurts it, other scenarios try to do similar things and just do it better than this one does. But that does make it a very good introduction to a campaign and the game as a whole. Which brings me to a separate issue. This scenario suffers because of the fact that you can play this and THAW in any order. 

If I’m trying to play smart and do well in Dunwich, EA is always the scenario I pick second. The loss of the second agenda feels much harsher in THAW and grabbing Francis from the casino feels like the better choice than saving Rice from the university. One gives you a token for the rest of the campaign, one doesn’t, it’s an easy choice to make (assuming you succeed at least).

But I feel that EA is much much better as a first scenario than a second. It’s the one of the two that introduces the concepts you see across the whole of the campaign. It’s the one which introduces the multiple endings, which is a real wow moment in terms of what the game can do for first time players. For lack of a better way of describing it, for me at least, it feels like a first scenario and not a second. And then you seemingly get punished for making this decision. I know there isn’t an ‘objectively correct’ solution, as I’ve seen people online argue that you should pick EA first as an important opportunity to pick up extra VP, but I feel that’s a much weaker argument, and THAW has a much more interesting side objective if you go for it second which is sorely lacking in EA. Going second it feels like you’re missing content, and I understand why, but it would be nice to see Rice replaced by something more than the alchemical concoction.

Anyway, EA is good, and the main reason it’s below THAW is that I believe THAW is equally interesting when you play it first and when you play it second, and that is not the case for EA. And then for the other 3 scenarios that haven’t made the list, well I just think they’re pretty much always great, whereas EA is merely good.

4) The House Always Wins

Wow, who could have seen this coming? The scenario that I said would be 4th in the rankings actually came in 4th. What a shocker! I had genuinely considered moving it up in the rankings solely to fuck with those of you foolish enough to actually read this article, but my convictions to the truth were too strong to be swayed by something as petty as my own amusement.

One of my favourite things about The House Always Wins (THAW) is the setting. Speakeasies are one of the first things I associate with America in the 1920s, so it’s nice to see the game make good use of its historical setting. A lot of Arkham scenarios feel like they could be set generically in ‘the past’ and do little to tie it very specifically to a time and place, whereas THAW could be nowhere and nowhen else. And, more importantly, speakeasies are fucking sick bro! Any scenario set in one will already have a lot going for it in terms of just being cool. Not gonna name any names, but just gonna say that scenarios set in speakeasies are way cooler than any set in stupid universities or museums where you learn things. Who needs to learn things when you can gamble and drink! Stay out of school kids!

THAW has quite an odd structure because both the acts and the agendas advancing change the scenario so much, but this leads to it having some of my favourite progressions in any Arkham scenario. The changes as the agenda advances are a good way of escalating the threat in a way that feels natural. From being at a casino trying to investigate and stay under the radar, to having to avoid the enforcers there roughing you up, to having to escape monstrosities beyond your imagination ripping you limb from limb all while escaping a collapsing building as they tear it to the ground. OK, it’s not particularly consistent narratively, and kind of comes out of nowhere, but this is a very well designed agenda deck for feeling the pressure ramp up more and more as the scenario progresses.

The Encounter deck for agendas 1 and 2 is incredibly unthreatening. It’s mostly filled with things which are minor annoyances, with the Bad Luck Encounter set being just about the easiest to deal with in all of Arkham, and that makes up almost a third of the cards in it. Plus, the O’Bannions can mostly be ignored until act 2. The Encounter deck in Agenda 3 is a different story, and a forced spawn of a Hideous Abomination enemy (which with a level 0 deck you are probably completely unprepared to deal with) is rough. But I also appreciate how the game lulls you into a false sense of security with the beginning only to suddenly raise the stakes (look, a gambling reference, aren’t I clever) as the game goes on. But the easier first agenda also allows you to have set up the things you need to make the rest of the scenario doable, which is a good inclusion to have.

While EA focuses on losing cards, THAW focuses on losing resources, which ties well into the speakeasy setting, but not enough is done with it. Most of the losing resources effects are tied into the symbol tokens you draw from the chaos bags and a handful of cards in the encounter deck, but these feel most threatening early game and by the time the late game comes around you can often cope with fewer resources. Losing resources also isn’t particularly fun to work around, it stops you doing the interesting things you want to do and is often just wasted time spent gaining more resources. It’s annoying, but luckily it’s only a small part of this scenario so it doesn’t affect anything too badly. Plus, it is very thematic and can be especially brutal in Act 1 of the scenario (which is a positive), and Act 1 is where I think THAW is at its best.

Acts 2 and 3 of THAW are fairly typical Arkham fare. Go around collecting clues by investigating different locations, spend them, attempt to complete side objectives and get VP, and then resign. Lots of scenarios use this formula and that’s because this formula works. Act 1, however, is its own beast, containing a couple of things that no (or not many) other scenarios have, namely the fact that you can cheat and the way you get clues.

I am very glad that gambling is included in THAW, it would be disappointing to have a scenario set in a speakeasy and then not explore what they could do with it. It’s a very accurate simulation of what I’ve found gambling to be like; the odds are very much stacked against you and the whole process is deeply unrewarding, plus it’s expensive to boot. And yet, for that one time you draw an Elder Sign token after gambling away your last 2 resources, oh boy, does that make you feel like you’re unstoppable! Gambling is good, kids! Do it more! Chase the RUSH! The other ways of getting clues in Act 1 (giving up allies and drinking at the bar) are also thematically appropriate, and the drawbacks of drinking leads to the interesting decision of whether or not it’s worth doing on this particular playthrough. And then you get cheating.

Common sense says that it’s never a good idea to cheat, it permanently adds a negative token to the bag for relatively little reward. The scenario is completely winnable without cheating, and you can also only do it during Act 1, so the reward is very short term for a long lasting effect. I’ve read a lot of people online saying that you should never cheat in THAW, that it isn’t worth it, that to do so would be the peak of foolishness. Then crown me the King of Fools my friend for I am a staunch believer that having the option to cheat is good, actually.

Cheating is at its most effective during your blind playthrough of the campaign, as you don’t know the drawbacks that come with it, but it’s Arkham so you know there’ll be drawbacks. The first time I played THAW I knew something bad would happen if I did cheat and so I chose to play it safe, allowing me to weigh up my options so I could properly assess my situation before jumping into the unknown, preventing me from making a potentially catastrophic error. Only joking, I began to cheat right away. And it was great! Even afterwards I felt the extra token as a punishment was fair, which I soon came to realise it was not when the token constantly fucked me over in later scenarios, but you can’t have everything.

For a newbie, cheating is an exciting prospect, it’s not something similar to anything else you’re seen in Arkham, and it’s very thematic to boot. To this day I often cheat when I play this scenario, because winning tests which by all rights you shouldn’t is fun! And making the whole campaign a little more difficult adds a nice challenge for you to overcome. Also, you’re telling me when you’re playing as Finn that he wouldn’t just… cheat? Because, he definitely would. Like 100% of the time. My man would have robbed the place dry before the scenario even started! A lot of other investigators too! And you, as players, are holding them back from being their authentic selves by not allowing them to cheat, shame on you!

Cheating is a nice option to have, and something I genuinely always consider doing, and that’s because there are always good reasons to do it! Whether to save myself in the short term, because it’s what I feel my investigator would do, or if I just want to say a proverbial ‘suck it’ to people online who say I should never do it. I can make bad decisions if I want! You can’t stop me!

THAW feels a lot more different when played first and second compared to EA, mostly because the objectives in the last act are different. Sure, on paper it’s doing a 3 willpower parley test a handful of times to gain control of a character and then resigning, but the fact they appear in such different locations completely changes the implications of what you’re doing. Saving Francis is usually pretty simple, he appears in the room where you advanced the act, and he’s also close to the exit, even if you still need to find it. Saving Peter, however, is a real challenge that you usually have to plan to succeed at. Simply by putting him in a different location and imposing a three turn limit to save him it becomes much harder even without the enemy that spawns at his location. Every time I’ve saved Peter it has felt like an achievement, like I did something cool, and whether or not the ‘reward’ for doing this is worth it in the long run, it doesn’t stop me from always trying to do it when I can. Overcoming a seemingly impossible objective in Arkham is great, and no feeling in EA comes as close to the satisfaction I feel as when I rescue Peter Clover.

Despite all of the good things I’ve said about THAW, it does have one major flaw. A flaw so unforgivable that it drains all the hope I have ever had from my body, leaving only an empty husk behind, wallowing in despair, barely remembering what the touch of the sun even felt like. And that flaw is that the space where you resign from also gives you VP for clearing the clues on it.

Oh cruel fate! Why do you mock me so? Have I not been good enough? Was getting all the clues from the Alley before I resign, only to be forced to drop them where I stand some punishment for a previous transgression? If so, what atrocity could I have possibly committed to be dealt such a cruel hand? Is the weight of sin on my soul so heavy that I crush all else beneath it? Never shall I get that VP unless I have specifically planned for it! Never, I say! So why taunt me with this promise of gold only to reveal that both it and I are naught but fools!

This unironically pisses me off so much that when I resign here I just take the clues off the board, giving myself the VP. Yeah, I know that’s against the rules, but honestly, in a scenario that’s all about cheating how can you expect me to do anything else?

3) Lost in Time and Space

This might be a contentious one, as I often see Lost in Time and Space (LITAS) ranked as one of people’s all time favourite Arkham scenarios, and don’t get me wrong, I love this scenario, and for a long time when planning this it was higher on the list, but on replaying the campaign recently I had to reassess what it is I like about Arkham scenarios, and unfortunately LITAS suffered because of it.

LITAS does so much right, but I think its biggest positive is how it acts as a mechanical end to the Dunwich legacy campaign. Few other finales feel like a culmination of the mechanics unique to that campaign, but LITAS feels like it could only be the finale of the Dunwich campaign. This might be because Dunwich has fewer unique features than the other campaigns, but as I’ve said earlier, losing cards from your deck and Beyond the Veil define so much of what this campaign feels like, and LITAS is the definitive scenario in my mind for using these mechanics. You are constantly being forced to cycle through both your deck and the Encounter deck, which is also fitting for the more abstract setting of this scenario. Plus, the Yog-Sothoth enemy plays into this feeling as well, deciding whether it is better to go insane or lose cards. Whether or not this threat is actually as prominent here as in some of the other scenarios is a different question, but you always fear the threat of Beyond the Veil in LITAS, which is more than I can say for some of the others.

I also really like the way locations work here, it feels as though you’re searching through a void for something, anything, you can understand, going from one impossible Escher-esk space to the next. Looking for understanding in a world where there is none, and settling on even a concept you can begin to wrap your head around as a place to start. Almost all of the single sided locations in this scenario present you with interesting choices you need to make on how you want to move forward if you hope to succeed. There is an intentionality in their design, and that comes through when you play the scenario.

I have often heard people say that the layout of the locations in this scenario is confusing and/or bad.

They are wrong.

Lost in time and space is actually a fairly simple map, and even with a handful of one way movements, most of the movement layouts make sense. The reason it’s hard to conceptualise is because you very rarely have the opportunity to see all the locations out at the same time, and even if you do, you may have just put them in random places on the table, making the map much harder to see. But what it basically is is two different routes connecting Another Dimension and whatever the goal happens to be at the time, with the added caveat of potentially having copies of the same location in play.  After about two playthroughs of this scenario I had this whole map memorised. I didn’t try to do this, I just did it organically, because I’m just naturally talented in all things and practically a perfect man. And if you didn’t also do that, you suck and are bad. This isn’t me being mean, I’m just saying it how it is.

Not all of the mechanics tied to the locations are good though. As I usually play True Solo I can often spend quite a long time just drawing cards from the encounter deck until a useful location pops up. I vividly remember the last time I played thinking “Wow, one of the next 9 cards must contain at least one location.” OH HOW WRONG I WAS. Not a single location was discarded that turn and then my turn was just… done. I had cycled through 9 Encounter cards while also achieving precisely nothing. And then, later in the game, it happened AGAIN. 2 full turns of me just getting rid of cards from a deck sure I’d get something, and instead getting fuck all. Now, normally I would have been rightly pissed off, but this is Arkham so instead I just laughed and went “It is how it is.” I still went on to win the scenario despite this setback, because I’m great. But this happening twice in a single game, just before I made this ranking, might be the reason it is not quite as high as it would have otherwise been, because even though I found it funny, it still annoyed me.

Another huge positive for the scenario is how simple the setup is. Starting out with only a single location and knowing it is only going to get bigger is exciting, and genuinely shocking the first time you play. It’s also a huge breath of fresh air after some of the hideously complicated setups you get in later campaigns that seemingly require at least three tables to fit everything properly. If you took a picture of the initial states In Too Deep and LITAS and showed them to someone and asked them to guess which was a final scenario, everyone would obviously pick LITAS because they know what the scenarios are and have played them, but if you found one of the few members of the population who aren’t aware of Arkham Horror: The Card Game (of which I assume there are dozens) I’m sure at least one of them would guess In Too Deep. LITAS is an epic scenario but it hides it well. Its unassuming start hides a fantastic scenario underneath it. It just shows you to never trust a book by its cover. Unless the book says it’s written by “Kyle”, then it’s a guaranteed banger. Or, if you didn’t like it, probably a different Kyle. But if you did like it, defo me.

Being a final scenario, LITAS has to have several different resolutions leading to the  endings of the campaign, and I really like most of them! They’re all short and sweet and don’t outstay their welcome, with most of the plot coming through the gameplay as opposed to a wall of text at the end. They are, in a couple of cases, perhaps too short, but I would rather too short than too long, which I am well aware is ironic coming from someone who wrote this article.

Sometimes after 8 scenarios you realise one important thing, you were too shit to do anything helpful, and now everyone is dead… whoops! I like this ending a lot, as I do the bad endings in most of the campaigns. It’s nice to know that if I lose then the whole world is fucked and it’s down entirely to me and my compatriots. What a lark! It’s life affirming to realise your actions have important impacts on a universal scale! Even if it’s all bad! But, that said, this ending is fairly standard as far as Arkham goes, nothing hugely special.

The ‘winning’ resolution is an equally typical ending. A success in spite of everything. And then… nothing, the only fanfare of your success being the trauma that will never leave you. You’ve saved the world and return to face a home you once knew, but it is no longer the same, for you can never forget the horrors of what you have seen. Yeah yeah, been there, done that, we’ve all seen a typical hero’s journey before, get a new shtick! Getting this ‘best’ ending does always give me a strong sense of accomplishment, but it’s definitely not my favourite ending.

One of the best aspects of Arkham is successes with caveats. So many of the interesting decisions in the game come from choosing how exactly you want to lose. In LITAS this is not an active choice, but the resolution where you stop Yog-Sothoth from entering our dimension but then get trapped and slowly lose yourself, never to be seen again, feels the most similar to this idea. You tried your best, and while you succeeded, you did not return. It’s a haunting image, and I love this ending because of it. I never lose a scenario on purpose, so I only ever get this ending when I have ‘failed’, but on the rare occasion it does happen I’m often more pleased with this ending than when I succeed outright. And luckily there’s no other resolutions that affect the emotional impact of any of these other endings…

Oh wait, there’s the resolution where you just get a shotgun and shoot an Elder God in the face. “After all these hardships and close bites with death, thrown into a situation far outside our control and fighting against our understanding of the universe and sanity itself, how can we possibly succeed?” “What if we just fucking blasted a God in the face?” “Oh yeah, solid plan, let’s do that.” *BLAM BLAM BLAM* This ending fucking sucks! It’s stupid and against theme. I have achieved it exactly once and that was when I decided to do absolutely nothing in the scenario except prepare for shooting a God in the face, and then proceeded to kill the bastard in 2 turns. And did I have a good time doing it? Yeah, obviously, it was hilarious. This big blob of a thing comes out looking forward to ruling over its own dominion when a private detective and man with a dog just start to wreck shit. They were high fiving over the corpse as their understanding of reality collapsed around them. I like comedy in my horror, and that was what this was, but I like it in the middle, not at the end. It can do well to raise the stakes, but the fact this ending exists undoes a lot of what I like about this scenario thematically.

I have one very big complaint for this scenario. The whole scale of this is just too… large. This is something the Investigators would be thrown into and they shouldn’t succeed, and yet they do. This isn’t an ‘against all odds’ situation, this is a “It’s too late and we’ve lost” situation. The fact that there is even an option of a ‘happy’ ending annoys me. I’ve also never found this scenario to be that hard. Sure, it’s tricky, but I definitely win it more often than I lose it, whereas in scenarios with a similar vibe, like Before the Black Throne, that is not the case. LITAS is hard but it isn’t hard enough, like a hammer made of spaghetti. Not wet spaghetti, dry spaghetti. So it still feels hard but would shatter to pieces if you ever actually had to use it like a real hammer. The reason I like the ending where you die after saving everyone the best in LITAS is because that’s the ending that should come after throwing yourself into a void to save the world.

I love LITAS mechanically and playing it is almost always a blast, but the stakes are just too high for my taste. The setting, while cool, is not what I play Arkham for. Give me a situation which is tough but doable and when they succeed I cheer. Give me a situation where everyone should lose and then they win and I go “This isn’t the right ending, why aren’t you dead?”. But, what can you do? LITAS is great, and I understand why people have it as their favourite, but it is not mine.

2) The Essex County Express

WOOOOOOO. Let’s give a big Choo fucking Choo to trains! Who needs something as esoteric as a void where time and space collapse into a singularity when you could instead have a big boy of a train stuck on a briiiiidge! The Essex County Express (TECE) doesn’t need any fancy shmancy bullshit to make a fantastic scenario.

I have a theory that any series containing action set pieces that goes on for long enough will at some point have a set piece that takes place on a train. I like to call this theory the “I just made this up when writing this article but stand by it because I think it’s accurate” hypothesis, so named because I just made this up when writing this article but stand by it because I think it’s accurate. This occurs because things set on trains are really cool. This interpre-train-tion is proven true incredibly early in Arkham, as TECE was only the 9th scenario they released, so clearly my baseless speculation is proven true and will be used by my fellow academics for years to come. Huzzah!

Speaking more specifically, there are a few obvious reasons this phenomenon occurs. A train is a location which is easy to conceptualise because almost everyone will have ridden one or at least knows what one is. Additionally there is an inherent directionality of it, as it only really has 2 directions you can go, forwards and backwards (plus up/down if you’re feeling ambitious) which allows viewers/players/whatever to easily understand the exact situation and therefore what the goal is. Plus, like I said earlier, setpieces set on trains are cool. And this scenario is no exception.

TECE is one of the only Arkham scenarios I’ve ever played where I knew exactly what to do based entirely on the setup. You start at the back of the train, you have to get to the front. Bosh! The story writes itself. This is a real caboost to the scenario, as it allows the story to be told through the gameplay, running panicked through a train from one carriage to the next. You lack the time to get properly set up as you usually would and instead need to improvise a way to success, which is different from normal and makes a nice change. You have to start strong and keep chugging along.

There isn’t a huge amount of variability in the carriages, but there doesn’t need to be. Having most of the carriages being fairly standard ones works in the scenarios favour, as you want to have at least some idea of what you’re going to expect. The simple setup of putting 6 of the 8 cards in a random order also does loads for the replayability of the scenario, as you never know exactly what’s coming next and you have to plan for it accordingly. And yeah, random chance plays a big part, because oh boy, can bad luck (the concept, not the Encounter set) really set you up for failure in this one. 

TECE contains the first big moment that made me go ‘WOW’ in the Dunwich legacy campaign, namely the flipping of the first Agenda. Few moments in Arkham have made me immediately go “OH SHIT!” out loud on the realisation of what’s going on. And I for one loved it. I managed to avoid losing on that first Agenda advancing by a couple of actions the first time I played and was shocked (in a good way) that one could potentially lose this scenario so early. This fluke of survival also led me to be incredibly cocky for the rest of the scenario, knowing I could comfortably just move out of the in danger coach before the agenda advanced and I’d be A-OK. The moment the third agenda flipped and I realised not one, but two, carriages were disappearing that I paused for a moment, understood that I had well and truly fucked up, and then just burst out laughing. I had so much joy in the moment at that loss, and that has stayed with me on every playthrough since. I think back on my untimely death fondly, for to dwell on your own mortality in any other way is truly a waste.

There are few scenarios that don’t end in campaign loss that I find as stressful as TECE. There is a sense of pace from start to finish, that even when you’re doing well, you know that a couple of bad draws could ruin your entire run. You are always so close to failure. You need to keep moving. The single word title of Act 1 “Run” is so viscerally true that you can do nothing but obey once the scenario starts. You have to move and you have to move quickly. So you do. This scenario gets my blood pumping, especially because of how badly it can screw you over on the first turn.

TECE is infamous because it is possible to lose the scenario in the first mythos phase if you’re unlucky with your ancient evils, in fact it can go completely off the rails! This is a fairly blatant design oversight, but luckily there are a few available solutions to this. Most obviously is to play the Return To variant with its extra agenda 0, that makes the scenario harder but lowers the odds of this happening. Next is one I am particularly fond of, and that is to be so utterly unpleasant in your everyday life that people are unwilling to ever be in the same room as you, and you therefore won’t be able to reach the high player counts where this effect occurs. This also has the added benefit of opening up the free time that would otherwise be spent on social occasions and can be put to a more worthwhile use, namely playing Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The last solution is the one I use most often, and that is simply not giving a shit. Arkham can mess you up and make you lose easily, that’s half the fun! There was nothing you could do, roll with it and see what happens next! This has happened to me and do you know what I did? Nothing. Some things are out of your control, and that’s OK.

Getting back on (train) track, the Encounter Deck of TECE is an interesting one. Containing a handful of annoying enemies, a bunch of cards that add doom to the game, inexplicably The Beyond (which is a lot less annoying without Sorcery also being in play), and a few cards that hinder actions and/or movements. The deck is threatening, there is a lot in there which stops you moving through the train as quickly as you like, and (with the exception of The Beyond) everything feels like it is targeted at making this scenario as difficult as possible. You can also have some really fun interactions by having a cultist appear ominously at the back of the train, only to immediately die because the train got dragged into a void.  In saying that, I hate this Encounter Deck a lot of the time because of how effective it is at what it does, meaning this is obviously well designed and doing its job as intended. Oh, and it also features one of my favourite Encounter cards across all of Arkham.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always found Helpless Passenger to be one of the funniest cards in Arkham. A person appears behind you, screaming for help, knowing that they will soon be sucked into the void and only YOU can save them. But why are they telling me? I don’t care! I flip them off as they get sucked off the train, with the mental damage I then take occuring I have, at last, realised what a terrible person I am. I do not believe I have ever saved a single one of these hapless chumps, and I plan on keeping it that way for many years to come. 

I love so much about this scenario. It’s tense and exciting, replayable due to the massive variance in location layouts. Yes, the scenario is a gimmick and swingy as hell, but it’s a good gimmick. The designers clearly knew this as they did a redux of this scenario with To The Forgotten Peaks. They knew they had something good here, that’s why they did it twice, and who am I to disagree with them? Well let me tell you, I am a person with correct opinions and I will disagree with whoever I want! But in this situation I do agree with them and that’s all right too.

Oh, I also like this scenario because it gave me an excuse to write some of the worst train puns ever envisioned by humanity, you’re welcome.

1) Blood on the Altar

Blood on the Altar (BOTA) is quintessential Arkham. It’s a fairly standard scenario with a couple of interesting central gimmicks which vary the format a little, but not a lot. On paper it sounds a lot less interesting and exciting than some of the other scenarios lower down on this list, but what it does have puts it among my all time favourite scenarios. It doesn’t try to be clever, because it doesn’t need to be to be good. It knows what it does and it does it well.

The kidnapping mechanic is one of the best in all of Arkham, too few scenarios can really cripple your deck if you’re unlucky and I honestly wish we’d see more of it.  Having the threat of a valuable asset being taken ups the already high levels of tension in this scenario. Losing scenarios should have consequences, I don’t need a slap on the wrist, this is Arkham, I came to suffer. And also to win, but if it came too easy it would be far less rewarding. Like seriously, sometimes I just want this game to fuck me over, and better have that happen in the middle of a campaign than at the end.

One of the most memorable campaign playthroughs I’ve had was when I lost Duke as a sacrifice while playing as Ashcan Pete. I knew from then on that my odds were stacked against me, that my chances of victory were fleeting, hope being but a shimmer in the distance, but that shimmer existed all the same… I fought through everything and came so close to victory, only to fall at the last hurdle. And the reason I still remember this playthrough (outside of the usual reason of me just remembering the dumbest most pointless shit) was because of the mechanics of BOTA. That is the scenario that facilitated this story. It made memories, and in a story driven game like Arkham, that is the highest praise I can give it. 

I also love that the kidnapped victims are not revealed until the end of the scenario. You place the cards under the Agenda and you have condemned them, and even if you do not know exactly who they are, they are dead all the same. And if there’s one thing you can tell from my love of the helpless passengers in TECE is that I am a BIG fan of the death of innocents. Like, sure, the murder of the guilty is nice and all, but a pure soul dying before their time is just extra spicy, y’know? The physical act of shuffling the deck and picking a card is shockingly effective for how simple this is; pick a card, any card, and with that choice you end a life. And, knowing my luck, it’s Earl Sawyer about 80% of the time, the poor dead wanker. Like, no joke, it took me until like my 5th runthrough of Dunwich for him to make it out alive.

The whole Encounter set in BOTA is very atmospheric. Kidnapped I have already touched upon, but pretty much every card here feels well placed. Even the Dunwich encounter set, which I find relatively uninteresting, fits the vibe of BOTA exceptionally. The whippoorwills calling from the rafters of abandoned houses, portents of death singing for the souls soon to be taken. Strange symbols cover the streets only slightly less frequently than the visages of bodies torn to shreds on the ground. Everything here works in harmony to make one of the most truly foreboding vibes to any arkham scenario. And as I look to the brooding sky, filled with creatures so horrifying they defy description, basking in the ambiance of it all, a mobster shows up and ruins it all by committing the greatest crime of all, being against theme. Sure, take my resources, attack me, but leave my sweet sweet vibes untouched you monsters! If you ever need motivation to save Peter Clovis, remember this. The vibe of BOTA is very slightly better without a bunch of mobsters running about shooting the place up, that alone makes it worth the hassle.

The other unique(ish) mechanic in BOTA is the hidden encounter cards under the different locations. This is monumentally swingy. You have a 10% chance of them being at the first two locations you check, but also a 10% chance of them being at the last two locations you check. But it feels like the latter happens a lot more than the former, so all of maths is probably wrong. You also have a percentage chance of other situations occurring, but I can’t be fucked to either work them out or look them up, so I won’t. I really like having to reveal these cards though, deciding when the best time to unveil a potentially devastating Encounter Card is an interesting decision to make. It’s also seemingly guaranteed to be the one card you absolutely didn’t want to see at least once a game. I usually prefer it when I find the key and chamber later in the game as it allows me to play for longer while building up the tension, but it’s also good to absolutely smash the scenario when you just happen to flip the two right cards first, because as much as I said Arkham is about fucking you up, it’s nice just to win sometimes.

Act 2 of BOTA is a big boss monster fight, something I usually don’t like that much in Arkham, but it’s executed well here. A lot of this comes down to the alternative win condition of discovering the clues in the hidden chamber, but even as an enemy I quite like Silas. He’s tough, but not so difficult that most investigators can’t at least hurt him a little. The lack of attacks of opportunity is also useful in making him a fair opponent, and both discovering the clues and defeating him are decently difficult, but doable, challenges.

Most Arkham campaigns have a ‘secret’ ending that can only be achieved by following a specific course of actions throughout the campaign. The Dunwich legacy does not have this, but the closest it comes to it is in how you deal with Silas. Choosing whether to try and discover the clues while having the Necronomicon in play (which is easier said than done) provides an interesting challenge. I know this results in a relatively minor change in WDA, but it’s one of my favourite long term payoffs in any Arkham campaign through the risks and decisions you have to take to achieve it, and while the reward itself may not be worth the effort, I always endeavour to at least try to save the poor soul that was once Silas Bishop. Except for the occasions where I just walk in and start blasting, obviously, then he is as dead as a mother fucking door-nail. Luckily the sound of gunshots is loud enough to drown out the noise of the moral quandary of gunning down an innocent being, but that’s why I make sure to do it as noisily and quickly as possible.

Not to imply BOTA is perfect, I have a couple of issues with this scenario. The single-directionality of some of the locations is annoying and doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, having rotting remains return in this encounter set seems very lazy, especially because it’s early enough in the games run, and the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi (which is coincidentally also the name of my first born son, although I call him Powibzi for short) should really be in the U&U set of cards as opposed to BOTA. But, that’s pretty much everything. None of these complaints are serious knocks against the scenario itself, just minor pet peeves, but I would feel remiss if I were not to at least suggest the scenario has flaws.

What BOTA does best is something that is shockingly simple. It lets Arkham shine as a system. I think we can all agree that Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a fantastic game, which despite all the complexities and particularities in the rules, at its core is surprisingly simple. You play cards, you gain resources, you move from place to place, and BOTA is one of the best settings to just… play the game. None of the gimmicks change the core gameplay loop, you have an extra incentive to work quickly, and then you get to play Arkham, a great game. It also doesn’t matter what kind of deck you’re playing here, everyone has something to do in this scenario. Killing monsters, finding clues, just hanging out as the world ends around you, you can do it all here! It’s not so hard that you need to have very specific decks to work, and not so easy you’re guaranteed a win.

What it all boils down to in the end, is that BOTA is fun, and that’s the reason I play games at all. The vibe is on point, interesting decisions are presented to you throughout, kidnapping is great, the gameplay ties into what you’re doing, but the biggest thing is that it’s just nice to play. And that alone makes it worthy of being in first place. It’s good, that’s all there is to it.

***

If you’ve finished reading all of this I would like to congratulate you on making it through this mammoth article. I hope you’ve enjoyed, or at least endured, my jokes, and I’d happily hear what your thoughts on the campaign are, purely so I can assess your moral fibre depending on how right or wrong you happen to be.

I’ve also really enjoyed writing (most of) this, and while I may write another one again in the future, don’t expect it any time soon. This shit took me way too fucking long y’all, but I think it was worth it. Anyway, thanks for reading, I genuinely appreciate it!

I have returneth.

The food I cook shall be legendary. The cuts I make in creating the dishes shall boggle the mind. The amount of money I spend on dumbass ingredients that I will never use again will bring both you, and I, to tears.

So yeah, I’m at it again, recreating every dish from season 16 of hit US cooking competition/reality TV show Top Chef. Sure, the last time I did this I was recreating dishes from season 18, which was a full two seasons after this one, but what does that matter? I also attempted doing this with season 20, but that season’s dishes were too hard to cook so I gave up! Just like I gave up on writing these articles previously when I realised how much work it would be, leaving my story cutoff in the middle, never to be finished.

Until now…

Except this series of articles won’t be about those ones at all. This is more like a reboot, so no satisfying payoff to the last series! I shall, however, consent to giving a brief recap of the latter half of season 18’s dishes to tie off loose ends: “They mostly turned out well, and I cooked everything I intended to before season 19 started, and it genuinely made me a better chef, go me!”

So why am I trying again? Have I not gained everything I aimed to from the first time I did this challenge? What possible outcome could I hope to achieve here other than failure?

Eh, who knows? I start things as dumb bits then never stop doing them. And that is exactly what happened here.

As this is a ‘new’ season, and a ‘new’ collection of articles, I will explain what this show and series of articles will be about. Top Chef is a cooking show in which people cook and make dishes, one(ish) dish wins each episode, and I will be recreating that dish at home and also writing an article about my experience cooking it or my general thoughts on cooking related to the dish to go with it (this very article you are reading now, oooooh).

I am also trying to keep these articles concise, so don’t expect me to go off on any elaborate tangents like in most of the other things I write. Instead I shall write about only food, no more no less. I will keep this mindset up for somewhere between one and two articles, after that I’ll make this whole series an elaborate homage to Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece Pale Fire, something I have genuinely attempted multiple times before. In fact, I may even have mentioned that very idea in a previous Top Chef article…

OH FUCK! I’M RAMBLING ALREADY. GET TO THE FOOD!

The first dish that I had to recreate was a Lobster Laksa with Halibut Ceviche, Pickled Bell Peppers and Confit Potatoes. I was pleased that this was the dish that won as this was a cold dish and it was the middle of summer when I would need to make it, avoiding some of the previous incidents like when I’ve had to make ice cream while it’s snowing or do a long slow cook during a heatwave.  This is lucky, as if it had been a dish I hadn’t wanted to make I genuinely probably would have stopped this challenge before this even began, and that would have left the world a far, far darker place. For me, at least. I imagine most, if not all, other people would be nearly totally unaffected. But this is my article, so it’s about me, get used to it!

This dish contained many elements I had tried or made before. Laksa is a Malaysian/Singaporian/Indonesian fish curry with a coconut base. I had had it once before but never made my own. Ceviche, a process in which fish is ‘cooked’ in lime juice, I have both had at restaurants and also made for myself in one of my previous Top Chef dishes. Confit potatoes are potatoes slow cooked in oil, so even if I hadn’t had them before (which I had) I could very easily imagine what they would be like anyway. And, lastly, picked peppers are something which, I regret to say, I make on the regs. Like, I full on just pickle things sometimes now, like an adult. Ugh! Truly, how far has my life sunk that I can say that and it isn’t even a joke…

The making of this dish presented several issues. Firstly, that lobster was far too expensive for me to buy, so I had to replace it with a different, far cheaper ingredient, ruining the integrity of the dish and making it worse, but alas, such is life. Secondly, that halibut was slightly too expensive for me to buy, so I had to replace it with a different, far cheaper ingredient, ruining the integrity of the dish and making it worse, but alas, such is life. Thirdly, that red bell pepper was far too expensive for me to buy, so I had to replace it with a different, far cheaper ingredient, ruining the integrity of the dish and making it worse… wait, that didn’t happen, bell peppers aren’t that expensive, just the first two things.

I replaced the halibut with cod as I thought it was the white fish that was best suited to the dish. And by best suited I mean cheapest reasonable substitute. I had a little trepidation in choosing cod, as it has a more subtle flavour than halibut, and I suspected that a cod ceviche would lack depth of flavour. But there were plenty of recipes online for cod ceviche, so I decided it was a risk worth taking. And people on the internet wouldn’t lie to me, would they?

The lobster was a far easier substitute to make from my point of view. As most shellfish is hideously expensive, I went for prawns. I know that lobsters and prawns are fairly different tasting, but I did not care, they are both shellfish and therefore similar enough for me. Laksas also use fish as an undercurrent in the flavour profile, so while this would certainly make a less rich and luxurious laksa, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. And it’s not like prawns are ‘that’ cheap yo…

But, disaster struck at the very first hurdle. After visiting no less than four different shops and supermarkets, some of which were VERY large, I could find neither hide nor hair of prawns with shells on. For you see, the shells were a vital part of the recipe as I needed to make a fish stock from them that would make the base of the Laksa. The large sainsburys near me was having fridge problems, meaning the fish section was only half stocked. Luckily I could find some reasonably priced raw prawns, but they were with shell off. Shell off? I ask you. I should have asked them to FUCK off instead, am I RIGHT fellow shell lovers?

My second thought was, much to my shame, buy some pre prepared fish stock and use that, but there was none of that either! I had already been out for a while and was too lazy to check the shops I had previously visited to find either shells or stock, so I did the only reasonable thing I could! I stropped around the store being annoyed, buying snacks to make me feel better. Truly, an adult am I!

Luckily, in my aimless wanderings I came upon my saviour, a thing that truly took an inspired mind (like mine, and not from somewhere else) to use as the basis for a stock. Dried shredded squid! Yeah, that thing you see people eat as snacks sometimes and make you go ‘that seems gross’, but I figured that seeing as it was dried fish, I could probably make a half decent fishy stock from it. It was also, more importantly, dirt cheap, so I bought it immediately.

Now, I know what I previously wrote implies that I did get the idea from somewhere else, but that was merely a slip of the tongue in this article which has gone through numerous edits so I could have cut the line if it was actually a mistake. ‘Twas an idea of my own volition, taken from nowhere. NOWHERE! And if you dare question this truth then begone from this article, and never return, for I am many things, but a liar is not one of them!

Seeing as this was a cold preparation, I realised I could make my life easier for myself and split the cooking process over a couple of days instead of forcing myself to cook constantly in a kitchen for a single, hellish, four hour cook in which I get in the way of all my flatmates and mess up my timings so badly everything that should be cold is hot and everything that should be hot is cold. Don’t worry, I’m only talking from experience here.

The first thing I prepared was the laksa. The dried octopus (which is an idea I did NOT steal, stop asking about it!) worked pretty well as the basis for a fish stock, and I found making my own laksa curry paste from scratch to be therapeutic. Grinding things down so they become a paste, whether in a pestle and mortar or a hand blender, losing all essence of what the items once were until they are in a new amorphous form is just nice innit. A lot of the recipes told me to buy laksa curry paste instead of making it myself, but I scoffed at them in derision and made my own anyway. And having never tried ready made laksa paste, I thought my one turned out very well, but I have nothing to compare it to, so it may well have been shit!

After I finished I turned the Laksa into a hot noodle soup which I had for dinner, before preserving the rest in the fridge so I could use it tomorrow. And how was it? Well I’m afraid you shall just have to wait and see…

The next day was more involved, but not by a lot, as I had three different components to make. I started on the one which would take the longest, the confit potatoes. The process of cooking in oil was not a hugely long one by itself, but I needed to assure it would come down to temperature before it was done so I figured I should play it safe.

I won’t bother going over the pickled peppers, as I’ve written about pickling so much in my top chef articles I’m sick of it! I quick-pickled it in the same way I usually do. Make of that what you will.

The ceviche was simple as well, you cut up the fish into chunks, put any flavourings you want with it (I had some lemongrass and a few herbs), cover it in lime juice, whack it in a fridge, wait, then drain off the excess juice and leave it chilling. Bosh!

Now, some of you might be thinking that all of the things I did were, well, fairly simple. And that’s because they were. Good food doesn’t need to rely on molecular gastronomy or overcomplicated processes, simple food is good. Sure, I also love that molecular gastronomy bullshit, it’s fun to do and nice to eat, but it isn’t necessary. Each dish is different, some dishes need it, but most don’t. This was one of the most relaxed top chef cooks I’d ever done, and I appreciated that. Simple processes can make nice food. And was the food nice? Well, why don’t you have a look and tell me.

Yeah yeah, I know you can’t tell what food tastes like just from having a look at it, but look at that shit, it looks good! And trust me, it tasted good too. The laksa was rich and sour and spicy with just a slight fishy taste, which was reinforced by the ceviche. The potatoes, while I questioned whether they would go with the rest of the dish, were delicious (wow, you cook potatoes in oil for a long time and they taste good, who would have thunk it?) and the pickled peppers added some acidity to the dish, although the ceviche already did that, but it was a different kind of acidity so was still good!

My only slight complaint was that the cod was not super suitable for the ceviche, and was definitely overpowered by the lime. Alas, dear reader, I was as shocked and as hurt as Buster in the children’s television show “Arthur” when he discovered that people would go on the internet to tell naught but lies! These charlatans had sold me a mediocre recipe! Like, it was still good, but not that good! I ask you…

But yeah, I considered the first dish of this attempt at the challenge a rousing success! I really enjoyed eating it, and I had enough leftovers to use a lot of the components again for different meals. Hopefully I’ll actually keep up both the cooking and the articles this time!

I hope you enjoyed reading this! And even if you didn’t, which is very rude by the way, I will force you to come back, for I have a confession…

I, Kyle, am a liar! The idea to use a dried squid snack as the basis for a stock was not my own. I took it from somewhere else, but from where? Well if you want to find out you’ll have to read the next article! That’s right, it’s a cliffhanger mother fuckers! And the stakes could not be any lower!

TO BE CONTINUED…

Life for a man such as I is often difficult. I have faced many a hardship in my life, and I know I will overcome many more in the future, until one shall prove too much for even me to withstand and so I, as all things, will turn to dust. I am, at this very moment in time, facing one of the most egregious hardships I have ever, and probably will ever, face. Alas, I do not see an end to it in sight.

My Dear Readers, I am a man of simple pleasures. I like good books, good company, and television shows of wildly varying levels of quality. But there is one thing I prize higher than all others. Something without which I could not hope to survive, and I would die of both metaphorical and literal starvation, and that is good food.

So, you may be thinking that this is about the cost of living crisis on a day by day basis. The price of supermarket food is rising at such a rate I can no longer afford to buy what I need. This is mere foolishness! Though I must admit, things have indeed been made pricier, but I have always been frugal with my shopping and I remain as such. Meat is substituted with vegetables, carbs are substituted with vegetables, and vegetables are substituted with cheaper vegetables. And so my food at home remains unblemished by the state of the world, in fact perhaps driven to even greater heights by the limitations that have been thrust upon me. Forced to perform such strokes of innovation that few men shall hope to see, let alone undertake themselves. It is not my food at home that suffers, it is what I eat when I am not at home.

Those of you who know me will know I am not a man of lavish or expensive tastes, I am merely a humble passenger in this journey we call life. But something that I need, that I rely on to survive, is getting further and further away from grasp with every second that passes. And soon, perhaps too soon, it will be lost forever to me, and my life will be a bland imitation of what it once was, lacking the colour and vitality that makes it worth living. I’m sure you have already guessed what I am referring to. I am hardly alone in this, the greatest tragedy of this age.

Namely, Michelin Star Restaurants are becoming too expensive and I can’t afford them as often.

Weep. Weep for me (Kyle). This travesty. This ungodly fate that has befallen me. WEEP. For I have no tears left to cry.

While in the past I could comfortably find a Michelin Star lunch for about £30, that is now a rarity, a pearl at the centre of an elusive oyster. Tasting menus that were once affordable have now doubled, nay, doubled-and-a-bit in price! Whereas once I could see myself amongst my peers, enjoying these meals, now I can scarcely even dream of reaching those lofty heights.

Even humble mashed potato, a side I would previously scoffed at the pittance it would cost me, has been seen at no less than twenty-five pounds a serving! This is not an exaggeration, this is the exact price it costs, though I fear I have forgotten from whence this price came, so appalled was I after reading it, that I fainted away and wiped its very origin from my mind.

So, Dear Reader, you may think that this is the end of I, Kyle Graves! That at last I have been defeated, thrown into the mud and left to rot. But to you I say, you underestimate my resolve, for it is as steel honed by the finest blacksmith in the land, forged in fire and blood! I did not give up, and I did not waiver. I would find a restaurant with a Michelin Star still within my price range!

And to those hecklers I hear crying “Why not simply partake in one of the many reasonably priced Michelin recommended restaurants that still exist, or perhaps those with a Bib Gourmand, just a hair’s breadth away from the ever elusive star.” And to you I say, while your heart is in the right place, I will not be bowed or quashed. My life is my own, and you have no say in it. If I, Kyle, wish to partake in eating at an establishment which has AT ITS BARE MINIMUM, a single Michelin star, then that is the only course of action that will sate me! I had a need to find a Michelin meal within easy distance of me, that I both wanted to eat, and that I could afford.

I knew this journey could take many days, weeks, or perhaps even months. But I was determined to look and look until I had found precisely what I needed. And after many many gruelling minutes of searching, I found a place I had bookmarked for being cheap previously and it still was so I decided to go there.

Weep again Dear Readers! Though this time let them be tears of joy that have arisen from the depths of your soul, releasing itself unto the world in only the saltiest of eye juice. Rejoice! REJOICE!

And what was this restaurant, this bastion of light and hope in the dark where all else seemed lost. Well clamour no more, Dear Readers, for I shall elucidate you. And truly, what an apt name it has, such a name that only the very finest of restaurants can bestow upon themselves. And that name is, of course:

Leroy.

***

Located in the heart of Shoreditch, this eatery must surely brighten the day of any weary soul that should walk through its door. And I knew, from the moment I saw its name, and more importantly, saw that a three course lunch cost only thirty-two of my hard earned British sterling, that I too was destined to pass through those pearly gates, ready to see the heaven that awaited me on the other side.

My first glimpse of this place, this oasis, this kingdom of unknown treasures, was seeing a sign, glowing as if by magic (or neon) on the side of the building. In curving letters I could see “Leroy” spelt out before me. As a ship sailing lost at night, fearful of being torn asunder by the rocks and waves, with no hope but that my death would be painless and quick, the lamp of a lighthouse shone out, and gave me hope of a future, a better tomorrow. That was this sign to me.

And so I approached, took a breath, and stepped inside.

I should add that, in spite of knowing exactly when I was planning on making my presence known to this institution, I did not bother to book. This was no simple act of hubris or oversight, this was done with clear intent. I knew God themselves was looking down upon me and, knowing my course was a righteous and just one, ‘twas ordained that I was to eat there, booking or not. If it had been fully booked, I fear my life would have come to an unsatisfying end on that very spot; lacking in the food I need to nourish my soul and body I would fall to the ground cold and alone. But I had faith. A just God would not deny me of this. And I was not disappointed.

I had chosen to luncheon on a day equidistant between one sabbath and the next, so was all things considered a quiet affair. Only a handful of pilgrims other than I were in attendance, but this was a pleasing sight for me, allowing the, shall we say, angels of the kitchen to devote their entire body and soul to me, Kyle, as is no less than I deserve.

Despite my lack of booking I was seated immediately in the back corner of the restaurant, clearly the most important and best spot of the entire eatery. They could tell that I was someone of great character and moral standing without me speaking a word aloud, for such is the strength of my will; all who see me know what I am, and what thou art not.

***

The lunch menu at Leroy’s is a limited affair. Unlike the a la carte menu that is served in evenings, I only had a choice of two dishes for each course. Two! I can already imagine some of the more faint hearted among you fanning yourself to cool yourself from even this imagined stress. But fear not, Dear Readers, for this tale is a happy one, though not without hardship. Nothing worthwhile in life is without hardship…

As I sat at the table, menu before me, I feared how low in the world I had sunk. Choices maketh a man, and so what can a man be without choice. In a normal menu there were hundreds of variants as to what a man could order, but with a choice of two dishes for three courses, there were only eight possible permutations presented… pittance!

Am I like an eighth of the rest of this damned population of the planet? Are there almost a billion people like me out there in the world? Am I merely a mortal man? I think not! And that a menu could suggest such a thing to me is foolishness personified. But I calmed myself, I was thinking in a way which was uncouth for a Gentleman such as I. I was better than this, and I must not allow myself to be lowered to their level.

I made my decisions, though even with such limited options, these choices were not always easy. For both starters and mains I hemmed and hawed, going back and forth between the two options with which I was presented, weighing the balance of one against t’other, before reaching my painful decision. Both options were so appetising I would have much preferred to eat both, but alas, a tasting menu is a world away from the world in which I now find myself occupying. So, in regards to making a choice so difficult even I was vexed, the starters and mains force me to doff my proverbial hat.

For the final course I had no such issue. Note, Dear Readers, how I have said the final course, and not as you may have expected me to say if I were continuing in a consistent lexicographical vein, the dessert course. This was because I was appalled to see that one of the options was not a dessert, and instead the thing I fear above all else in a short course meal, a cheese plate.

Now, as those of you more refined reading this shall be well aware, a cheese plate is not a thing to be afraid of usually. In any longer menu with five or more courses a cheese course is well suited and well placed near the end of such a meal. Cheese courses can be true things of beauty when done correctly, but only with the knowledge that at least one dessert must follow, as day follows the dawn or a slight you have done me will be repaid in double and in blood. A cheese course is not the final end point of the meal! Only a dog would believe such a thing! A dog! But then I do all dogs a disservice, for even they would turn their noses up at such debauchery.

So, for the third course, there was no choice at all. I chose the actual dessert, and not a plate with consisting of a small piece of cheese, perhaps two crackers, some chutney, and the most most important ingredient of all, sadness. (Here I must confess that my imagination ran wild, I saw no-one else foolish enough to order the cheese so invented the plate myself. I apologise. The actual dish was presumably far far worse) I considered giving a meaningful gaze when they asked which of the two I wanted instead of words, so sure I was the the anger in my eyes would convey my murderous intent to have a sweet ending. But no. Manners prevailed, and I simply spoke the words I was required to say, though I fear I could not as well hide my scowl.

I could at this point describe what the restaurant itself was like in terms of decor and ambiance in great detail, but I do not care to do so, so will not. I came for the food, the rest was simply set dressing. Though I will put a few words forward to appease those of you who may care to know.

The atmosphere was pleasant, with a singular theme to the art on the walls, and while not to my taste, was not poor. The music was played live on a vinyl record player, I did not care about this one way or another, for why should I, but I feel this may be something that some of my more… eccentric readers may wish to know.

The main benefit I saw to the establishment was the kitchen, which was open and easily viewed from near every table in the restaurant. The vibe, if I am to lower myself to describe it in such a way, was very friendly and amicable. I fear I have already spent too long talking here about other, non-food related matters, and do not care to inform you any further, so we shall see to it that this ends here and leave it at that!

***

To start I ordered a dish that was simply listed as Boudin Noir, Blood Orange, Date. This is how most of the food was listed on the menu, a series of ingredients with no description of the plate itself. You must render your imagination to see what the dish would be like as a whole, which while not difficult to me, would probably be tricky for some of you reading this. Though this was not consistent in the menu, with some dishes, such as the main I chose, being explicitly described in the description. This was a minor annoyance, though I’m sure if I required more information from the waiters I would have asked and received it in short order. Though I did not, for I thought better of both them and myself than to waste time by having them say words that I would then ignore and then just order what I would have ordered anyway. My will is strong, and once a decision is made, even when lacking vital information, it is not easily swayed.

This was a decision I very quickly came to regret.

When the starter arrived I gazed down and stared at the dish before me with abject horror, though I hope I hid it well behind my noble exterior. I saw fried boudin noir (a french form of black pudding), a date purée and a blood orange sauce. They all looked appetising, but there was something else on the plate, something which has brought fear to my soul many times before, and I have no doubt will do so again. An ingredient that has ruined many dishes I have had in the past, and I was fearful that this would be another victim of that.

I almost daren’t speak its name, for even that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. And what is this ingredient that fills me with such horror, such a vision of hell that even a Mother attempting to save her young would at least pause in the face of it? What? What is this aspect of hell made vegetable? What?

‘Tis that scoundrel Radicchio is what it is! A bitter herb in name and flavour! Curr! Fiend! Thou who hast ruined many a plate of chicken livers that I have tried in futility to enjoy. Thou which hast left me wincing on more than one occasion when a bitterness consumed not only my whole palette, but also my whole soul! Foul villain! These were the thoughts that crossed my mind as I saw the radicchio clear as day on the dish. The waiter might have explained what the dish was, but ‘twas all for nought, since I would recognise a foe such as this from a hundred paces!

But I had to be brave, this was not an ending. There was a simple unhappy solution. This issue could be easily resolved by not eating that which was on my plate. The thought of doing this made me scream internally, at the waste of both money and food, but I knew that enjoying a meal is more important than being frugal and suffering because of it. To steel myself the first thing I tried on this damned plate put before me was my sworn nemesis radicchio. So I cut off a small piece, and took a bite.

Dear Readers, I must tell you that what happened now shocked me to my very core, and has perhaps changed my whole world view forever, for as I took a bite, as I let the flavours mesh in my mouth, I was struck by something I had thought mere moments ago was impossible, was a dream that could never hope to come to be. But that dream was real, and before me, for the radicchio was delicious. There was a hint of bitterness, that is true, but not in any way overpowering, and in of itself a pleasant palette cleanser, as opposed to its usual role of knocking the gates of castles down with such a force as to render the entire building structurally unsound forever more.

There was even sweetness in the bite! Sweetness! A concept usually so alien to this bitter fiend that I could scarcely say them in the same breath without commenting on the irony, but I soon realised how this had come about. The blood orange sauce was lovingly poured on these leaves and added the sweetness that it needed. But, I must admit, even without the sauce the leaves I think would have remained a pleasant level of bitterness, and not at all the sledgehammer approach that is usually found when I have eaten radicchio in the past. Could this delicious new leaf cause me, in turn, to turn over a new leaf on its own?

No. No it could not. ‘Tis still my most hated foe, but in this situation ‘twas very nice.

After trying the radicchio I tried some of the blood orange sauce on its own. It was sweet, though lacked much depth beyond that. A mild disappointment, but hardly a catastrophe.  The date purée was, however, absolutely delicious. ‘Twas very sweet and had a depth of flavour deeper than any well. It reached down, down to the centre of the Earth and beyond, moving through crust and mantle until it eventually went through the very core before erupting out the other side into a sky of light and glory. It was impeccable.

But now, to the main ingredient, the Boudin Noir, the black pudding, the blood sausage, the clotted blood mixed with oats, herbs, onion and apple. I cut into it a little, it had a softer texture than I’m used to with the dish, but this was not off putting, after having tried everything else I was confident this would be equally delectable, and I was not disappointed. 

The meatiness of the pudding was strong, adding a savoury note that the dish needed, with the other flavours within the pudding blending together perfectly to make a sweet-savoury bite. But there was one stroke of genius here that I had never before seen, a revelation I felt as those who stood before Moses as he laid down the ten commandments onto them.

The pudding had been slightly caramelised.

I cannot emphasise enough how much of an improvement this simple aspect of the cooking changed the dish. It went from good to exemplary. The slight bitterness and sweetness it provided elevated it to the status of a God in my eyes. It was divine.

I find it almost superfluous to say here, Dear Readers, that when had together these components also existed in perfect harmony, with the dish eating very sweet, but the slight bitterness of the radicchio and the boudin noir preventing it from being too much. While nice independently, the dish truly sang as the Valkyries did, riding into battle, when it was eaten all together.

This dish is the one of the nicest dishes I have had in these last few years. It was near faultless. Faultless! Could anything I have after hope to live up to this level of glory?

No. No it could not.

***

There is one thing I have found that holds true through almost all the food I eat. Starters, while not necessarily better, are invariably more interesting than the main courses which follow. You can sense in a starter a passion to experiment, to push forward, to change the world, whereas a main is meant to comfort like a good book or a baby reaching for a milky teet. They are both good in their own rights, though I am far more inclined towards interesting food than good food. But preferably, of course, both.

The main appeared before me only a little time later than the starter, five minutes having scarcely passed in fact. Sometimes I appreciate this expedited process, and other times I loathe it, for I am a man of many whims and passions which guide me and haunt me in equal measure depending on the angle of the moon and the rise of the tide. This establishment was lucky this was a day where I wanted to eat Michelin star food and nothing else. They would still be quaking in their britches otherwise, for my wrath would have been bloody and beautiful, the kind of gore you cannot help but keep your eyes on, like staring on into the endless abyss that is death.

This main was quintessential of what I expected in a winter meal; a pork cheek ragu with polenta. Simple and unpretentious, exactly the opposite of the foods I usually deign to eat.

It looked unspectacular on the plate, but I must admit it was exactly the kind of hearty meal I would want to eat on a cold day, and on this day the weather ‘twas as cold as my heart, so that was pleasing to see. It appeared exactly as it had been listed as, there was no surprise chicory hidden under the sauce, or mustard hiding in the polenta, so in that regard it must be considered a step above the previous plate.

‘Twas the polenta that most whetted my appetite as the plate sat before me, though not perhaps for the reasons you would expect. I have had occasion to make polenta for myself, but I have, to my shame, never had it when at a restaurant. I may have had a polenta cake, Dear Readers, but that can of course be nothing compared to un-caked polenta, or so I assumed as, again, I had only ever made it for myself.

When making food for myself that I have never tried before it is always an interesting experience, for I have no comparison for what I am eating, and whether or not I like it is often unrelated to how well I have made the dish. On one occasion I was making a Japanese sunomono, and when finished, I tried it and decided it was good, but not my favourite thing, but had absolutely no idea if that was down to me having made it incorrectly. It was almost a year later that I eventually had a chance to try it again, and discovered that the dish I had made was shockingly similar, and I was equally pleased with my own ability to cook, and disappointed that this dish, while a step above my attempt, had still not wowed me to the moon and back.

It was a similar case for polenta, I have made it previously but it did not inspire greatness in me, and so I hoped the dish I had today would reveal the truth to me, whether it was my skill as a chef that betrayed me, or merely the food itself that failed to satisfy my, justifiably, lofty expectations. And, were I to be unsatisfied, to cast any future thoughts of polenta into the flames and forget it as a failure, a blip in history forgotten in the realms of obscurity, not a soul remembering it after it is gone.

Alas, Dear Readers, I will be unable to decide one way or another today, for the polenta was so entirely saturated with the ragu that I was unable to get a good taste for it without the sauce. Though I will begrudgingly admit that it was perhaps, much much better than the one I had for myself at home. The level of creaminess and richness was perfect, and was slightly smoother than my own attempt, leading to much better eating as a whole.

And as for the sauce, well it was hearty and rich, filled with an assortment of vegetables that would make any person with an allotment pleased to see their myriad of vegetables put to so good a use. It did everything it needed to, no more no less. And sometimes, just to be, is enough.

This was not one of those occasions. I expect nothing but the best, especially after a starter as perfect as the one I had already eaten.

The pork cheeks themselves, however, were most wondrous in their execution. So often in a ragu the meat becomes a part of the sauce, though that was decidedly not the case here. Cooked to just before the point where even the bluntest of swords might slice it in twain without difficulty, the texture of the cheeks were perfect. They were succulent and moorish without having been integrated into the sauce itself. The taste, too, was exemplary.

Together these components were not more than the sum of their parts, but they were the sum of their parts at least. No one component let the others down, they worked together and did as expected, as Isaac did when his throat was about to spill hot blood onto a cold stone, and created a very good, if unspectacular, dish. But this is nothing to sniff at, a dish not adding too much is of the utmost importance, and it cannot be overstated how a single poor component can ruin a dish.

If I had one slight complaint for the plate as a whole is that the flavour profile was fairly uniform, but as a complaint this is not worthy of the death penalty, a simple binding in irons would suffice. Perhaps the loss of an eye for good measure. Maybe even a dash of torture. But no more than that Dear Reader, for I am a reasonable man, not prone to rash decisions.

While the main was not as exciting as the starter, I was satisfied for now. Though my hunger for something sweet could very well consume me, and the whole world, were something not done about it soon.

***

The wait for the dessert was slightly longer than my wait for the main, though probably still scarcely a few minutes. This was less appreciated though, I prefer for the gap between mains and dessert to be one that leaves my appetite well and truly whetted.

The dessert I ordered was Poached Rhubarb, with Chantilly cream, bergamot cream and crumb. “Two creams?” I thought, amazed at the gall to have more than a single cream present on a plate, where surely one cream would be more than needed. “A crumb?” I groaned, seeing my old bain of Michelin dinners returning again to feature in apparently every dessert they deem worthy of offering.

Truly I had fallen into an abyss of only the fanciest of desserts, lacking any recognisable characteristics that desserts usually possess, leading me to something which defies any description other than “’Twas sweet, but not that sweet”. It is not something I would often order given a choice, but with a cheese plate as the only alternative truly I had no choice at all. The stars had already divined my fate, and I was mercy to the whims of the Gods.

I had lofty expectations as I briefly waited, the previous dish had been good and the first spectacular, and I was enthused to discover which of the two this would be more of. You need only wait as long as I did, Dear Readers, but alas, the news is not good. The dish was merely ‘very nice’, and not an experience that I will remember to my dying days, reminiscing on the flavours that past over my tongue that dies, as I breathe my last shallow breath.

If this dish were to be described in a single word, as so often in the case in restaurants such as this, it would be the word ‘Rhubarb’ underlined, in bold, italicised, plain and clear for the world to see. Unbiased. Unyielding. Unafraid. It would be the shining light that all other things looked to. And would the rhubarb have lived up to these loftiest expectations?

Put simply: No.

The rhubarb was pleasant, and it did exactly what was required of it, no more, no less. And without it the dish would have been too sweet, but it never impressed me in the way that I so hoped it would. The colour added a necessary contrast to an otherwise beige plate, and the flavour was distinct to the others presented. And, in one sense, it did live up the goals I placed on it. It was what the ingredient which the rest of the dish was designed around, the satellite to which they looked to as a God. But ‘twas not a God. ‘Twas a rock in space. Or, in this case, some nicely poached rhubarb.

As for the two creams, I had been concerned that they would be similar in texture, but fortunately ‘twas not the case. The Chantilly was entirely typical, but well made and given the proportions of the other components, allowed you to adjust the sweetness you had in each bite.

The bergamot cream was delicious, with a texture close to that of a posset, a loose panna cotta, or a freshly plucked eyeball. This was good in its own right, but it truly shone when combined with the other components, making them each taste richer and deeper than they did alone. It tied the whole dish together in a way that had not been expected.

The final component is that friend of fancy desserts everywhere, the sweet talker of many a Michelin meal. I speak of crumb! A simple crumb, with little flavour and less character, but providing an invaluable service to many a meal.

Some who have never had a crumb may wonder what this mysterious saviour of desserts is. I must now lower myself to your level as I now attempt to put it in words you might understand, it’s what you would often find atop a crumble, but less stuck together. Each crumb like a grain of sand in the wind, but without wind to move it, so just falls on the plate, scattered and separated. It adds crunch to what would otherwise be a uniformly soft dessert, and is unobtrusive in its own way, adding little other than texture to the meal. But, when I had bites without the crumb and bites with crumb, the added texture was well placed on the plate. It made each mouthful varied.

Be still my aching heart! Crumb! You have saved a dish yet again, valiantly riding in and being a little crunchy in the mouth! Crumb! Thine Mother would be so proud if she still lived, as you do this in her honour, oh simple crumb, oh brave crumb. You did what you needed. And you did it well. Be still now. You have done your part. Be still.

And yet you are dull as ditchwater, are you not? You have one characteristic that you do well, and so fools deem it important to put you on dishes when needed. And while effective, ‘tis also lazy! So as much as I may thank you for saving the dish, do not expect me to be thankful crumb! I look forward to the day when even the memory of you is a footnote in history.

But consider this Dear Reader. If someone (not I, for I am not such a fool) were to be foolish and eat too much of the crumb early on in the plate (again, ‘twas not I, to remind you, this is merely an example) this could spoil the balance of the plate by their own making. And if this were to happen, which again, it did not, it would mean the dish ended on a weaker note than it started for ‘twould now be too soft. But, in this case, where doth the blame lie? With the eater? A person too foolish to regulate their own plate, or with the chef to allow such an issue to arise in the first place. And seeing as I am not a fool, not that this happened to me, it must be the latter!

But enough of this! The dessert ‘twas sweet, but not that sweet! Lay on Macduff as we approach my closing remarks which have had as much thought put into them as the rest of my words written here combined!

***

In conclusion, yeah, it was ‘aight.

Hello, I’m Kyle Graves, and I have  decided that I will stand it for it no longer! For too many years the things I have written have lacked broad appeal, are on too niche topics, are overlong, and are about things which aren’t in any way relevant to the cultural zeitgeist. But no more! I am a new man this day, and things will never be the same.

Alas! I may have already irreparably put off many, many potential readers by doing these things so consistently in the past, and I need to win them back! But how to do that? The only way to remedy this is to add an introduction to all my articles to succinctly summarise why this article is for them, and why they should read it, allowing me to become the writer I’ve always dreamed of being. So, without further ado, the summary of this article:

In the next seven-and-a-bit-thousand words I will be talking about six books from a decade ago you have probably neither read or heard of… hope you enjoy it!

***

So, for those of you who don’t know, the Booker prize (previously known as the Man Booker prize before FEMINISM took over) is an annual award for the best English language book release in a 12 month-ish period. Simple as that. You might as well call it the ‘Best Book of the Year Award’ because that’s what it does, but there are frankly dozens of best book of the year awards, so giving it a different name was probably the right move.

Every year, a long list of twelve or thirteen books is released, before being cut to six for the shortlist, and from that shortlist a winner is announced. You know, like the way awards usually work.

But what has the Booker Prize got to do with me, Kyle? To put it simply, every year since 2013 I have read the Booker Shortlist, and I had wanted to do something for the 10th anniversary of the occasion, including writing an article where I talk about the prize in general and what my thoughts were on some of the nominated books. And after a decade of reading, what are my thoughts on the prize? Do I still enjoy it? Or have I damned myself to be repeating the mistakes of my past by writing yet another article no-one will want to read! Only finishing this article will tell you that!

***

So, as all stories start, we begin with the beginning. (Legal notice: I am aware not all stories start at the beginning, please do not sue me for lying or being wrong. Anyway, this is more like a prologue, which is usually before the main narrative chronologically, so fits here quite well too.) I was sixteen, it was the summer before I started Sixth form, and I was on holiday with my family in Chamonix, France.

At the time I was a voracious reader, reading sometimes up to a book a day (which for some people isn’t that much, but dude, give me  a break, it’s a lot for me.) And I know on this holiday I read a lot of books, but honestly I can’t remember half of the ones I read there. Like sure, if you asked me about them I might go “Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure I read that” but that would be it. Time has dulled my memories and they have turned to dust, as all things must. There is only one book I can vividly remember reading there, flicking through the pages while the wind blew through my hair on the balcony of the ugliest building in Chamonix (Legal Notice: this is not an exaggeration, the building was ugly AF, and you can quote me on that). That book was ‘Life of Pi’.

I was hooked immediately, it captured thoughts and feelings I’d had but never seen expressed anywhere else, which is something very few books can lay claim to do. It’s genuinely the book that made me an atheist (which some might call misinterpreting the entire ethos of the book, but I would just tell them to “Shut Up” before turning around and leaving with my fingers in my ears unable to hear their retorts, thus winning the argument) but the point is that it prompted me to have those thoughts at all. It also had a tiger in it, which was pretty fucking cool; Tigers are neat-o.

As I was reading it my Mum mentioned it had won a prize, a prize I’d never heard of before. The Man Booker Prize. And those words changed my life forever.

Except, let’s be real, I’d probably heard of the award before, and just forgot, because it meant nothing to me at the time. And it’s not like I hadn’t heard of some of the other books that had won, I just hadn’t read them. But saying I heard of the prize for the first time here is better for the narrative of the article, so we’ll pretend that’s the truth, because it’s convenient and doesn’t have any tigers in it. (Ha ha, a reference to the thing I’m talking about, aren’t I clever and twee?)

After that I paid a lot more attention to the Booker prize than I had previously, by which I mean I was vaguely aware of it whirring along in the background of my life, and might look up some previous winners and think about reading them, while doing absolutely nothing to make that a reality.

There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, I was only reading a very limited selection of books at the time.  Mostly at that age I was reading either classics or modern classics, mostly because I thought it was intrinsically funny if I (someone who did science and maths) was more well read than people who actually studied English, meaning I could show them up in conversations because I was (and still am) a prick.

The only other books I was reading back then were Young Adult series a la the Hunger Games, because I had completely given up reading books like that when I was about 12 when I decided I was now too grown up to read them (which I was not) and they were beneath me (which, to be fair, they were and are). I’m really not selling my likability as a child here am I… oh well! And with all my time dedicated to being a prime bellend, there wasn’t a lot of space in my reading library for contemporary classics, unless you count the hunger games, which I don’t, because, you know, it isn’t.

The second reason is that my Mum told me that ‘Life of Pi’ was a children’s book, and most books which won the Booker Prize weren’t, then advising I should wait a little before attempting to tackle them. Admittedly, ‘Life of Pi’ is one of the more accessible books that has won the Booker prize, and if I were to recommend a Booker winning book to a non-reader, ‘Life of Pi’ would probably be that one I chose. But I think describing it as a children’s book is reductive. It’s not a children’s book, it is a book children are capable of understanding, there’s a difference.

There are some books I would unabashedly describe as children’s books, like the ‘Rainbow Fairy’ series my sister used to be really into at a similarish time, which now has OVER 200 BOOKS IN THE SERIES?!?!?! Fucking hell that’s a lot! I assumed the series had finished when I started writing this paragraph, did research mid-writing, and now realise they’re still being published? They’re doing fucking Birthday Fairies? What the fuck are Birthday Fairies? Fairies for Birthdays? For fuck’s sake! You’ve already had a regular ‘Party Fairies’ series? Were Birthday Fairies so different you felt the duty to cover this theme a second time? Had you perhaps begun to run out of ideas after OVER 200 BOOKS? Fuck me, they’re always just the same plot anyway! And now I’ve forgotten what point I was trying to make with this paragraph. Blah blah children aren’t stupid and can understand books even if they aren’t about fucking fairies… or something.

Back to the matter at hand, for those reasons and others, I didn’t read any Booker nominees for the next couple of years. it didn’t really bother me as I always had it in my head that I would read more of them at some point, but the opportunity never presented itself. That is until the end of 2013. I had just started university and I was… quite enjoying it. (Don’t read into that too much, it’s an accurate description of a complicated feeling, and genuinely doesn’t belie any deep emotional unhappiness, just a kind of ‘eh-ness’ to the early university experience.) But there was something far more important I was actually looking forward to coming up. That’s right! Mother-Fucking Christmas baby!

***

Back in the day (ie pre 2019) there used to be a company called ‘The Book People’ that sold cheap books. This was obviously one of the greatest companies of all time and the fact that it was dissolved last year genuinely makes me a little sad. You could always count on them for a good deal, and it was one such deal that began my Booker journey. Again. Not counting ‘Life of Pi’, which doesn’t count because I don’t want it to.

Every year ‘The Book People’ would have a bundle of all the Booker Shortlisted books for less than half of the usual asking price of all six books, which is what we like to call in the business an ‘absolute fucking steal’! And so on Christmas day I found myself becoming the proud owner of several weighty tomes (and one far less weighty one) that compromised the Booker Shortlist of 2013.

Now, I didn’t start reading straight away. It was Christmas, and I tend to try and keep my reading on the lighter side over the holidays, except when I ignore my own advice and just read whatever the fuck I want because rules are for squares. That year, however, I stuck to that general rule, meaning that there would be a couple of weeks before I tackled the first of the Shortlist. And that gave me time to think. And for any of you who know me, giving me time to think about things is always the wrong move. I’ll overthink things to an extreme, and giving me the opportunity to ruminate on something will make me make dumb, overambitious decisions. Decisions such as reading the new Booker Shortlist every year for the rest of my life.

Worst thing is it didn’t even take me the full two weeks to come to that decision. It was probably about boxing day, sub 24-hours. But if there are dumb bits to commit to that no-one else will, have no fear, I will be the person to bear that burden for the rest of humanity. Do not weep for me, friends, it is a challenge I undertake for all of us.

What I actually spent most of the two weeks before I started reading was deliberating over the specific order I would read the Shortlist. This is, of course, utterly pointless and I should just read whichever book I felt like reading at the time, but this thought genuinely never even crossed my mind, so instead I had to spend hours meticulously debating the order in which I should read the books. A fantastic use of my youthful days.

I will not go too much into my deliberations of the order I wanted to read the books, but I will give you a rough reasoning on my thoughts as I remember them. But please understand, they were far more elaborate and nonsensical than what I am explaining to you now. 

Being the logical, organised person that I am, I started with the last book I would be reading, which was never going to be anything but the winner. Save the best until last and all that. This is the only rule I still keep to this day, trying to read the winner last.

By a similar logic, I wanted to leave the book (outside of the winner) that I thought I would enjoy the most in fifth position. The other positions were more fluid. I wanted the first book to be something I had an actual interest in reading, but that was such a low bar I could pretty much do what I wanted at any moment. For the rest, I wanted to keep the flow of books interesting, by which I mean I wanted to space out books I thought would be similar (whether through genre, writing style or length) to keep them feeling fresh when jumping from one book to the next.

I also decided (again, completely arbitrarily, as were all the decisions I made when deciding to do this) that I was going to read one book each month for the first six months of the year. Luckily, I managed to keep to this (and never did again for any of the years after). The main reason I managed this was that I was in first year of uni and therefore had a surplus of free time, and also none of the books in the 2013 shortlist were that difficult to read. Which is lucky, because some have been absolute fucking nightmares to comprehend to say the least (looking at you Ducks, Newbery Port, you eight sentence, 1000 page dick weed). These all flowed easily, and I was never particularly worried about not finishing them by the month’s end.

From this point I will be talking about the books that made up the 2013 Shortlist in the order I read them, which, if you are lucky, you might vaguely remember having seen or heard about one of them somewhere.

Full disclosure, it’s been almost ten years since I read them for the first time, and almost that long since I’ve thought about some of them, so take what I’m saying with a pinch of salt. What follows is not the truth, it is my memory, and that is no more real than the words I am writing down on the pages here. So, in one sense it is real, as these are my true thoughts, and you might glean something from what I say. And in another sense it’s all absolute bollocks.

***

The first of the 2013 Booker shortlist I read was ‘’The Lowlands’ by Jhumpa Lahiri. A sprawling tale about two brothers from India and how their lives change over the years. I remember the exact moment I started reading this book, flicking through the pages while sitting at my desk in my uni room, looking over the words as I, y’know, read them, because it was a book. But, do you know what I don’t remember? That’s right! A lot of what happened in the book! Wooo, great way to start off a ‘review’ of something. But again, this isn’t a review, this is a musing, and therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want! I don’t even need to mention the books if I don’t want to. I can just fucking ignore it! 

But I won’t do that. That would be stupid.

One of the reasons I really enjoy reading the Booker Shortlist every year is that very often it talks about cultural things I have never encountered before. I admit that sometimes I can be a little ignorant of important world affairs. Mainly because the news is depressing and makes me feel an awful sense of hopelessness that consumes my mind, but that’s just life innit. But reading these books allows me to hear about things that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have, because I’m a dumb-dumb idiot man who likes books, games, nice food, and roller coasters, and doesn’t much care for the things in life that don’t matter, like the geopolitical environment of the World. Which is why you have to include them in things I like so I can experience them and go ‘oh, that’s interesting, I’m sure glad that this roller coaster taught me about the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency in India!’ That’s what happened here. Except, you know, instead of a roller coaster it’s a book, and instead of Naxalite–Maoist insurgency in India it was… oh no wait, it was exactly that!

But, talking seriously for a moment, I do genuinely appreciate that reading can teach me so much about my own personal ignorance. I didn’t even really know the topic existed at all before reading this book, and while my knowledge of this is still pretty lacking, I know a lot more than I would otherwise. And by continuing to read these books every year, I think I carry that on.

I was being slightly facetious earlier when I said I didn’t remember any of the book, what I should have said is that I can’t remember much about the latter half of the book. The first thirdish of the book remains very clear in my mind, focussing on three interesting characters, their lives, and how they interact with each other. There is an intensity I recall from the beginning of this book that I have not often seen elsewhere. The characters didn’t jump off the page, but they were compelling in their own right, and I felt I understood why they chose to make all the decisions they did. And it is rare that I can recall characters even many years after I read it, so it must have done something right. That doesn’t take away from the fact that my main memory is that the book was a little overlong. But alas, that is the truth, what else can I say.

Saying this, I know I enjoyed the whole book at the time, even while I felt it could have been shorter. But this slightly negative feeling I had in of itself provoked an interesting response from me at the time. I enjoyed the book, but didn’t love it. And because I was young and naive, I thought this was because I was missing something in the book. Looking back now it seems obvious I just liked the book a little less than the judges, because people are autonomous and have their own thoughts and opinions, but that genuinely didn’t even cross my mind. I was extremely (or, well, a little) concerned that I just didn’t get the book properly and that everything was going over my head and I was therefore an idiot.

Feeling stupid for not liking a book was not a new thing, having happened plenty of times before and since (though less often now, wooo), but it still isn’t a pleasant feeling. Sometimes books just aren’t for you, and that’s fine. HA, PSYCHE! If you don’t like good books you’re a bellend, I was just lying before, I think you’re all morons and couldn’t appreciate fine art if it punched you in your stupid (because you are unintelligent) face!

Anyway, the Lowlands is a book I quite enjoyed, but it means a lot more to me than the enjoyment it provided. It is the book that started me on this journey, and regardless of the flaws the book might have, it made me feel like I was beginning something that I had wanted to do for a long time, and nothing can take that away from it.

***

The next book I read was ‘The Testament of Mary’ by Colm Tolbin. This novella follows a first person account from Mary, who is none other than the mother of, your friend and mine, Jesus H. Christ. She talks about the ‘wacky’ antics her son and his band of merry misfits get up to while also thinking of both his and her mortality and the nature of faith. (If it wasn’t clear, the antics were not wacky, I was being sarcastic.)

This book was controversial with conservative Christians at the time of release because it treats Jesus and Mary as human beings with thoughts and personality, something they neither wanted to acknowledge or think about for some weird reason. Also Mary doesn’t really comment one way or the other on whether Jesus actually was the Messiah and definitely says Joseph was his biological dad. Which, as you can probably imagine, went down extremely well with fundamentalist Christians, who responded with grace and decorum, and definitely didn’t lead to any books being burned, no siree. 

This book stood out to me immediately for being, by far, the shortest book on the shortlist, being a whopping ninety-six pages long. This meant that I read it in a very different way to how I typically read books. Usually I like to space it out, giving me time to ruminate on what I think and not overwork myself by forcing myself to read it more than I want to. But, with books this short I like to read them in a single sitting, and that is exactly what I did here.

I remember lying in bed, having just woken up early on a quiet university morning, no lectures until the afternoon. My roommate was out and I hadn’t really been sure what to do with my day. Then I turned to my side and saw ‘The Testament of Mary’ placed on my bedside table, so I picked it up and read the whole thing in one go.

My room was lucky enough to get natural sunlight in the morning, so I didn’t even need to get out of bed to turn on the light. I just read. And after a couple of hours, I had finished it, and was awed by how much I had enjoyed the experience. (God, did I seriously use the word ‘awed’, geeze, was I reading a thesaurus while writing this? I should probably just change this instead of adding this comment, but I think you need to know that I’m the kind of person who refers to himself as being ‘awed’ by a book. That’s the most important takeaway here.)

It is not often that I would call a book quotable, and that continues to be the case here, because it isn’t quotable, full offence. However, it is undeniable that Colm Tolbin has a way with words in the book, just not in the sense that I would go around and quote it, because that would make me a pretentious arsehole, not that I’m not both pretentious and an arsehole, but it doesn’t really fit my vibe of pretentious-areshole-ery. Point being, there are some very good lines in this book. The opening sentence contains one of my favourite lines in any book ever: “Like a brutality boiling in their blood”. I find there’s something visceral in this description, and this quote has stuck with me since. Sure, it might be because it also appears on the cover in big gold letters, but they are nicely printed letters of well written words.

I loved this book the first time I read it. It was a serious book without being a long one. I am not a religious man, so some of what was meant probably wasn’t fully understood by me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good story when I read one. And this was a very good story. This was the first book of the 2013 shortlist to make me realise that I was doing the right thing, as I would never have read it otherwise.

But, in saying that, there is an important word in the last paragraph that might not seem like it at first. I loved the book the ‘first’ time I read it. I did not love it anywhere near as much the second time. When I read it again seven years later I was struck that it wasn’t like I remembered it being. It was still good, I enjoyed reading it, but I didn’t find it to be truly great. Perhaps that was down to my headspace the second time I read it, or because I have become more critical with my reading in the intervening years. Or that I just used to be a fucking idiot.

Even then, nothing can take away the memories I have of reading that book for the first time, on a cold sunny morning in my bed, and feeling the time slow down as I fell into a good book, and coming out the other side with a smile on my face, feeling I had done something worthwhile.

***

Third on the list was ‘Harvest’ by Jim Crace. And it’s about everyone’s favourite thing! That’s right, the Enclosure Acts babyyyyyyy! Oh boy, I sure do love reading about the way they affected life in Britain in the past, it’s my favourite thing. And then the book has the most original premise of any book I’ve ever read. Some strangers come to town. I know right, pushing the fucking boundaries of fiction here.

I’ll start by saying I enjoyed this book, but it wasn’t exactly unpredictable, but that isn’t a negative. The themes of the book were well set up from the get go, and the book explored these themes to their logical conclusions. Asking questions about how group mentality can cause terrible things to occur, or how progress changes things in ways that are not always for the better for individuals, and on what it means to belong somewhere. And because of this it’s pretty clear where the book is going from the moment it starts, but knowing an ending before it happens doesn’t make a book bad. The book has a sense of tension throughout, bursting at the seams, where you know everything will come to ahead and crash down suddenly and horribly, but you are powerless to do anything other than watch from afar.

I actually really appreciated how unsubtle the book was. Good books don’t have to be overly complicated or fly over your head with their themes to be worth reading. Properly understanding exactly what a book is going for the first time you read it is a sign of an accomplished writer. Equally, the book didn’t seem like it was talking down to the reader. But when there’s a story about a village, set in no specific place or time, it’s hard not to go “Oh, maybe this is an allegory for what some things are like now, isn’t that clever.” And it makes you feel smart for working that out, which is good, because even though I know I’m smart, it’s nice to see the evidence to back it up sometimes.

The writing is easy to read with some nice prose, but reading it immediately after ‘The Testament of Mary’ always meant I was going to be more critical of it than I might otherwise have been. And it is definitely not as good on a line by line basis. That’s not to say it’s bad, just that it’s less my thing, which is an equally insulting thing to say as I have a perfect opinion of all things. All praise Me (Kyle)!

There were also aspects of the book on which I was more critical. The book is told from the first person, and I felt I never really got to know the narrator, even after 300 pages he almost felt like a stranger. And while I enjoy books where the whole point is that it’s a slow motion car crash, and it doing something surprising with that would have undermined a lot of the themes it was going for, one of my favourite thing in media is to be surprised, and this book didn’t do that once. It was well written, everything made sense, but it lacked the extra spark I was looking for to make it a truly great book.

I enjoyed reading ‘Harvest’ (which is very much not true of all the Booker books I have read) but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. Which is unfortunate, but what can you do? At the very least, this was one of the first books I’d read since studying English at GCSEs that made me go “Oh, I can still analyse stuff critically and find themes and shit,” but also made me realise that I don’t love doing that.

***

Next was ‘We Need New Names” by NoViolet Bulawayo, and if you thought I couldn’t remember anything about ‘The Lowlands’ then oooooh boy, have you got another thing coming kiddos! Here is genuinely everything I remember about the book. There’s a child (I cannot remember the gender) in Zimbabwe (maybe) who then moves to America (maybe). I think it’s a coming of age story somewhat, because it’s about children getting older, but honestly at this point that’s just me assuming based on typical narrative tropes. That is genuinely almost everything. I could look it up and check to see how accurate that is, but honestly, that would defeat the purpose of this article… wait, no it wouldn’t, but I don’t want to, so I won’t.

The question then becomes: “How does one write about something one doesn’t remember?” Especially seeing as I already touched on this earlier in the article, and I have to endeavour to keep the article fresh and interesting. Honestly, for ‘The Lowlands’ a lot of what I was saying about not remembering the book was exaggerated and played for laughs, whereas for this one my memory is almost non-existent. What I do remember can be best described as the individual strokes of an abstract painting held under a magnifying glass. I can see some of what’s there, but I cannot recall even begin to imagine what the whole picture might be.

I remember a group of children sitting under a tree and talking, I remember someone mindlessly watching TV, I remember an ending that I felt was a little too abrupt, and I remember things coming full circle in the narrative. How many of these things actually happened, and how many didn’t? How do they relate to each other, what were my feelings at the time, what did any of this mean? Dunno, I forgot. Whoops! And what good is a book, that even though I’ve read, I have no memory of? If I read a book in the forest and eventually I don’t remember reading it, did I even read it at all?

The odd thing is, despite remembering little of the content, a lot of my experience around reading the book is still clear. I remember its weight as I carried it around in my bag on the way to uni. I remember the cover, with its bright colours popping off the page. I remember finishing the book and thinking ‘eh, that was OK’. I’m also certain I liked it, just not as much as the other books in the shortlist.

But saying this, I’m not sure I would even remember any of this had it not been one of the Booker Shortlist. That made it special, made it different, otherwise it would just be a book that I read, didn’t love, and forgot forever. The only reason I’m able to remember anything more about it is because it took a special place in my mind by being one of the books in the first year I completed a pointless, self imposed, challenge. Context can make memories more important, more clear. I don’t really know where I was trying to go with this, but I didn’t remember the book, and I did the best with what I had. Give me a fucking break. I have no clue why this is more then like 10 words. Here is what the paragraph probably should have looked like:

“I don’t really remember the book. Next!”

***

Do you know what fucking sucks? Writers writing about writers. Like sure, write what you know, but Jesus Christ, there are other things. The number of times I’ve read something where the protagonist is someone who is aspiring to be a writer is frankly far too many. And I, for one, am sick of it!

Book reviews, and any kind of literary criticism in general, could also be argued to fall into this extremely broad category. And I will argue this. I will argue this to the death! “Oh I’m going to use the medium that books use, the written word, to write a review, without any sense of irony, I’m just that much of a twat!” Any kind of discussion about a medium must intrinsically be compared to, on a similar level, the media it is criticising. “Oh but Kyle, writing books and writing reviews are completely different things with their own individual sets of goals and challenges and are extremely different to each other.” My response: Look at those words you used to criticise my words; checkmate! Conclusion, anyone who writes anything fucking sucks.

Anyway, ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki, a book about a fictionalised version of the author herself trying to write her memoir interspersed with the life of a Japanese school girl is one of my absolute favourite books of all time, and Ruth Ozeki is one of my favourite authors. That’s right, I do have consistent opinions, thank you for noticing.

Tropes are only annoying when they’re done badly. When executed well they often don’t even seem like tropes at all. That’s the case here, despite doing a lot of things I usually cannot stand in books, this book is a lot more than its tropes and has stuck in my mind incredibly well for the last decade. I can still recall vast sections of the book, how it made me feel, how it made me think. I had never read anything that made me feel like this before, and it made me want to read more of it, and so I did.

I’m pretty sure I started and finished the book in a three or four day period, which for me was a blistering pace. I couldn’t wait to find out what came next, and so I didn’t. I just carried on reading. Usually when I do this with a book, I quickly forget everything that happens, the events going in one ear and out of the other, reading so quickly I don’t have time to truly comprehend the words; that was assuredly not the case here. This book has stuck with me in a way few books ever have. I cared about the characters, I understood them and wanted the best for them, which for me is a novelty. And why did I feel this way, what was the narrative outside of what I’ve described? Well, you’ll just have to read the book and find out. Yeah yeah, I know this is a copout, but fuck you, I can do what I want.

Ruth Ozeki has a real mastery of the English language. It is unpretentious but used perfectly throughout the book. While not being as immediately obvious, she uses the language exactly as it is needed to get her point across.

The book also crosses another big red flag I often have, in that it is very philosophical and ruminates on its own philosophy a lot. Luckily, not that I agree with all of it, it works well in this book and justifies its place there. With Ozeki herself being a Zen Buddhist priest, you’re going to be hearing a lot of stuff on this topic, but she knows her shit and elegantly intertwines it with the story and never ponders it for too long so that it becomes preachy.

But, despite all this, this book is not perfect. There are always two words I dread reading in any book, two words which I know will be misinterpreted in a way which doesn’t make sense, and those words are ‘Schrodinger’s Cat”.

People will (almost) always misunderstand small particulars in the science of quantum superposition and just focus on the metaphysical aspect of it. Unfortunately this is also the case here. This does not in of itself ruin the book anyway, and honestly doesn’t even diminish my love of it too much, but it is because of its presence in the book that I cannot give it a perfect rating, for even things which are very good, have their flaws.

But anyway, let’s not end on a downer, the book is fucking great, go read it!

***

And so that brings us to the winner of this whole thing, the book that beat out the others to be declared the best! ‘The Luminaries’ by Eleanor Catton. And was it the best? Nah, I thought ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ was waaaaaay better, but it was probably 2nd. Probably. ‘The Testament of Mary’ was pretty good too… Anyway, it wasn’t the best, the judges are all morons and I have the only worthwhile opinion on all things.

‘The Luminaries’ is about the disappearance of a man, an enormous fortune, and a handful of other mysteries set in the New Zealand goldfields in the mid 19th Century. The story revolves around a man who comes to town (oh wow, again? so original!) and twelve people who are related to the events which are going on there.

The main ‘gimmick’ of the book is that each of the twelve aforementioned people are tied to one of the zodiac signs, with the remaining characters in the book representing other astral bodies. This is something I didn’t really pick up on the first time I read. I mean, I knew what was going on, but my knowledge of astronomy was (and still is) pretty much non-existent, however not knowing about it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book. But it did occasionally make me go “Am I just missing something here?” while reading it. And the answer to that was, “Yeah, kind of, but not in a way which really matters.” People with a good understanding of Astronomy will probably get more out of the book than those who don’t, but the book is written such that it is still very good even without this knowledge.

The most memorable part of the book, for me, was its structure. It was split into 12 sections, each representing a different phase of the waning moon, and thus each section gets shorter as the book goes on as the moon also shrinks. Now this one I did pick up on, but it also means that the first section is over half the book while the last few are only a handful of pages each, I think going down to as short as a couple of pages by the end. This gives the whole ending an odd feeling, with some of the last chapters feeling very slight, because they are. It’s not bad, but it felt that the book could have been 50 pages shorter and had a similar outcome.

The writing was easy to read, which for an 832 page long book is an absolute necessity, as if it was difficult to read it would have been a huge slog. As is, it was only a bit of a slog. I vividly remember taking this book out when on the train one day, and realising that I should never take this book out of the house because 1) the hardback copy was very heavy, and 2) it had a really nice cream cover that I immediately got large sooty fingerprints on while on the underground, which it still has to this day, reminding me of my never ending shame. At least it was easy to read at home… but my advice is to just get the paperback, less fuss.

I don’t often read historical fiction, and gonna be honest, New Zealand in the 1850s ain’t exactly my wheelhouse, but Catton was good at setting the tone of the place. I guess. I mean, I haven’t been to New Zealand in the 1860s, or even Oceania at all, so she might have been completely wrong and I wouldn’t know better. But she made the place seem real, which is more important than reality when it comes to fiction.

I appreciate the Luminaries for its ambition, and I can see why it won, with its puzzlebox of a plot slowly revealing its secrets as you go on, with (literally) a dozen interconnecting characters who you have to slowly see how they relate to each other. It is unfortunate, as so often it is with books of this type, that the beginning is better than the end. The setup of the puzzle is almost always better than the reveal. There are also some things about the reveal which felt out of place with the rest of the book, but they didn’t overly bother me, so all’s well that ends well.

But yes, this was the last of the Shortlist I read, and it won, and while it was not my favourite, it probably did deserve to win. But equally all the other nominees also ‘deserved’ to win one way or the other, so who cares.

***

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Booker shortlist in 2013, but did it change my life? In some ways I guess it did, because I still do it every year, but not in a “wow my life will never be the same again” kind of way and more in the “welp, guess this is just what I do now” kind of way. Do I regret starting doing this? Hell no! This was a great decision, and I think more people need dumb things they do every year for no real reason. I’ve read some absolutely cracking books, and it means I can look like a right dickhead when trying to explain to people who don’t know me that I do things like this on a regular basis, which is something I have always aspired to.

But what was my feeling on the 2013 shortlist? At the time, I was definitely impressed, even the books I liked less than the others I still had positive thoughts on and was glad that I had read, and it was easy enough to complete that I was sure I’d be able to do it again every year in the future. Forever. Never stopping.  That is genuinely how committed I was to it after finishing that first shortlist. But, y’know, that’s very me.

Looking back, I think this was a strong year. Not my favourite, but definitely up there, and ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ is in my top five Booker nominated books I’ve read, so it was definitely worth it in that regard.

Thanks for reading this, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this and getting my thoughts written down, and I hope you enjoyed reading it too.  But maybe now you should read something of actual worth instead of my ravings on the internet. What a waste of your time. Thanks again, bye!