by <PERSON> (<PERSON>) v 3/27/21 (added review for The Mysterious Illness).
Backstory
Our family loves solving mysteries and crimes. We really get into the Chronicles of Crime (CoC) experience embodying the personas we encounter with voice characterizations, affectations, historically accurate phrases and geographically relevant terminologies. So if you’re like us you probably quickly burned through all the amazing CoC cases originally released, the subsequent officially-sanctioned Noir and Redview expansions as well as the extra modules available through the app. Of course, we were ecstatic to learn of the 1400/1900/2400 series of new CoC standalones that launched on Kickstarter in 2020:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/300300/chronicles-crime-...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/302098/chronicles-crime-...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/302312/chronicles-crime-...
We quickly consumed all of the very fine cases in the 1400 offering late last year. However, corona-associated delays mean that we unfortuantely won't have the rest of the new content for some months yet. According to Lucky Duck's 1.21.21 KS progress update here are the expected timelines for the remaining official scenarios:
Chronicles of Crime: 1900 - April 2021
Chronicles of Crime: 2400 - June 2021
Chronicles of Time Expansion - August 2021
Given this reality, we have continued to explore the world of fan expansions to satiate our crime-solving appetite and found a wealth of tantalizing and innovative fan-generated content.
To date we have played through 40+ CoC scenarios including the tutorials and 22 fan expansions (at 1-4P with an average player count of 3.1). Below I’ve assembled reviews that I’ve written for each of the English fan-created scenarios to help guide your selection including my ratings on the BGG 10 point scale. Please be advised these were largely compiled from March 2020 to March 2021. As many are continually being revised and improved YMMV. Hopefully you’ll have an even better experience than we did. Wherever possible I have attempted to critically review the content to facilitate improvements and inform would-be players while preserving sensitive case details without spoiling the fun. Please recognize that it is a challenging endeavor to speak informatively and succinctly without revealing too much.
Finally, it is my hope that these evaluations and in particular the criticisms should be taken constructively. 200
I love this game system and fully recognize how much work is involved in producing any scenario much less a high quality product that is fully functional, intellectually challenging and above all fun to play. It took me countless hours to play through these fan scenarios and many more to write and assemble these reviews. Each designer spent even more time writing, coding, playtesting and re-coding these scenarios. Therefore it is intended that these comments and suggestions are meant to foster scenario improvement, help prospective players identify suitable cases to solve and are in no way meant as a disparaging reflection of the designer’s abilities.
Let’s Get It Started (…Ain’t Just a BEP Song)
It’s easier than you might think to play a custom fan-written scenario for Chronicles of Crime. Simply proceed to the BGG CoC files page located here: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/239188/chronicles-crime/.... Download the case to your device that contains the CoC app. Open the CoC app and select Options  Open Community Scenario  Select the downloaded scenario file. You are now ready to begin your case. There are already more than a dozen fan scenarios published in English (and many more in French, Polish and Japanese) to choose from. Do be forewarned, these are not all created equal. Some are suitable for families while others involve serial killing or other extreme violence and many have coding problems since these are rightfully viewed as works in progress.
Case by Case Review of the CoC Fan Expansions (as of 3/27/21)
A Simple Case of Theft? by PingPong12345
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/185793/simple-case-theft
9.5 of 10
All I can say is wow, what an incredible scenario that showcases what CoC can really do! This case (we played v 1.2) is well written, innovative, thought-provoking, with great app integration, scene art and above all fun as hell. Incorporating Guess Who-style gradual reductionism into CoC is brilliant and an exceptionally entertaining aspect of this scenario. We ultimately only scored 95/200 and three stars, our lowest percentage to date, but what an incredible journey. 200