Full disclosure: A review copy of Kronologic: Paris 1920 was provided by Super Meeple / Hachette Boardgames.

Okay, I think this is one of the first new reviews that I’m debuting this hybrid format-lookin’ box with. At the beginning of reviews where there might be a relevant series, I’m trying to help drop an infobox with relevant games in the same series. For places where there are a lot of reviews (Oink Games, for instance), I’m adding a bigger infobox at the bottom of the reviews. If you like it, let me know? I’m trying to spruce up the site and improve discoverability. This box is for the Kronologic series since I’m planning to dive into a few of these soon, so let’s start with Kronologic: Paris 1920!

In Kronologic: Paris 1920, the Paris opera can’t catch a break. The detectives keep getting poisoned, singers are losing their jewels under mysterious circumstances, and, wildly, there appears to be at least three Phantoms of the Opera? As many as five, I’ve heard. Thankfully, when crime gets too confusing, they call you in to investigate! You’ll have to make a name for yourself as an investigator by beating your fellows to the punch, though! So deduce, infer, and occasionally imply to be the quickest (and most correct), and solve some mysteries! What can you learn in the depths of the opera house?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

There are a few different scenarios with this one. The core game has three, though, so choose one of them:

That’ll give you a setup booklet and five sets of six cards, one per location. Set those face-down:

Set the Time Boards out:

Place them and the Character Boards in the center of the play area:

Place the Location Board there as well:

Give each player a player sheet and pencil:

Have them put it behind their player screens:

Then, follow the instructions in the Setup Booklet to set the game up for Time 1. You’re good to start!

Gameplay

Kronologic: Paris 1920 is a game of solving mysteries! Just be careful: as you do, you’re giving your opponents information as well!

In a given game, you’re presented with one mystery to solve. As soon as you think you’ve got it, you can try to win the game and check the solution. If you’re right, you win; if you’re wrong, you lose!

On your turn, you can take any person or any time and check the location against it. In the former case, it’ll tell you how many times that person went to that location (as well as one specific time they were there). In the latter, it’ll tell you how many people were in that location at that time (as well as one specific person who was there). The first half of each is public information: that gets shared with the group. The parenthetical information is just for you! Sometimes, you get unlucky and you get the same public and private information (for instance, 0 people being in a location at a certain time). When that happens, you’re shown a “go again” arrow and you get to go again!

Play until one player solves the mystery!

Scenarios

There are three scenarios included in the base game:

• Poison in High Society: A famous detective has been poisoned! Can you figure out when it happened? You’ll have to determine who had the opportunity to poison the detective by being alone with them!
• The Phantom of the Opera: Who is the Phantom of the Opera? Only you can solve the mystery. Of the suspects, who has been alone the whole evening? That certainly might be suspicious!
• The Singer’s Jewels: Someone’s robbed the most famous singer in town and taken her priceless neckless! The problem is, they keep passing it off whenever they’re alone with an accomplice! Track the thief and the jewels and help the police figure out who to catch and where!

Choose your favorite!

Player Count Differences

I think higher player counts reward and challenge your deduction skills a bit more. The key is that with more players, the balance of information shifts from private to public. At one player, for instance, you’re always getting public and private information with every turn. Your goal is just to solve the mystery as fast as possible. With two, you still always get public information, but now you’re only getting private information every other turn (or less, depending on how some of those “take another turn actions go). This means you need to be thinking more critically at higher player counts about what could result in the information that you have, and you need to not play wastefully when it’s actually your turn. That makes it a bit more difficult, yes, but it’s just as difficult for other players in a similar position to you, so it’s still fair, at least. It’s an interesting way to switch things up. I don’t have a strong player count preference, as a result; I usually play this with two, but that’s a function of my gaming group more so than a comment on the game.

Strategy

• The game operates on a few specific rules that will allow you to infer certain things. One rule, for instance, is that everyone moves on every turn. This means that if you know the Detective is in room A at time 1 and room C at time 3 and A is connected to C by room B, then the Detective is in room B at time 2. You can usually skip a few confirmation steps this way.
• Watch out for how you take notes. I generally try to record as much information as possible on the sheet, but make sure that you know what your notes mean. Usually it takes a game for players to get used to the style of note-taking that’s most helpful for playing the game, I think, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you get things twisted during your first play.
• Remember what you’re trying to solve for. The three scenarios have very different goals in what you’re trying to figure out; don’t get them twisted. Also double-check before answering that you know exactly what questions you’re supposed to be answering. I goofed that in a different game of Kronologic and got stupidly lucky, but that’ll only work once.
• Keep an eye on what your opponents are doing. Are they checking certain things one after the other? Can you get a sense of what they may or may not know? What are they looking for? The more that you can figure out based on what they’re doing, the less you need to look into on your own.
• You can solve at any point, if you think you’ve got it. If you think your opponent is about to solve it on their next turn and win, you might be able to get away with swooping in and trying to solve it first. Just, you know, make sure you actually know what it’s going to be.
• I wouldn’t recommend guessing unless you’re sure. I think there’s enough complexity to the answer for each scenario that you can’t really just guess. It functions off of a similar idea to person-place-weapon that Clue uses, classically. You might be able to guess one or two of those things, but three things chosen at random are going to be pretty tough to get right just off of luck. Instead, let the deduction do the work for you.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I just think more games should have the Phantom of the Opera in them. It’s fun and doesn’t give me as much to complain about as the movie does, and I like the movie. But I think the idea of a creepy lurker slinking around an opera house to do crimes is just kind of fun. Certainly better than the book, geez.
• I do like how the complexity ramps up. Each scenario ramps up from I to III, and within a scenario the mysteries to solve get progressively more difficult. It’s a generally satisfying progression of challenges, which is nice.
• Surprisingly, the game is replayable, but you should give it a few beats between replays so you don’t remember all the details. We will see if I eventually forget who the Phantom of the Opera was in the mission I played, I suppose, but I definitely had a few months between my plays of the first game, so I wasn’t able to completely remember my first playthrough and still had fun.
• This plays pretty similar to Clue with a very nice group play element. I think that an issue I have with Clue is that the “public information” aspect of it depends on how much you are paying attention and know how to keep track of what’s leaked by other players. Here, public information is explicit and shared widely with everyone to keep track of, so it makes the game feel informed by the classics while still being approachable for all sorts of players.
• It’s smart that no-op turns let you go again, even if it can be a little annoying. Nobody loves sitting around and watching someone else take five turns in a row, but sometimes that’s just the way things go. It’s better than having someone use one of their limited turns and get nothing out of it. Designing features to prevent player frustration is always a win.
• I think the deduction is very satisfying throughout the game. The game’s got a lot of places where you can make logical inferences from fairly limited information, which makes me, the player, feel smart. It’s always nice. Sometimes you also can set things up so one piece of information clicks a bunch of other information into place, and that’s awesome.

Mehs

• I don’t love that the game just ends once a player gets the answer right; I want everyone to have a chance to solve the mystery. We have modified this a bit when we play now, just in that we let players continue to play even after a player wins so that everyone gets the satisfaction of having solved it. I find that players care about solving the mystery overall a bit more than they care about solving it first.

Cons

• I wish the solutions booklet and the setup booklet were two different things. I don’t like having a booklet where it’s possible to accidentally flip through and see a solution, is the thing. I understand it’s more expensive but I’d still rather have setup and answers separated.
• The extra complexity of the final set of challenges, while entertaining, can sometimes border on tedious. It’s specifically that you’re trying to track an item that is stolen by one person, always passed when the person with it is alone in a room with one other person, and then you have to determine who has it and where. It makes inferring a bit more challenging, which can make the games take longer.

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Yeah, Kronologic is a super fun series, and Paris 1920 is a great first entry! It’s got fun art and great character design, sure, but what I’m really here for is the deduction. And there’s plenty of it. I think where Kronologic as a series works well is by having a hard rule about how movement works, so between each time you know that certain characters are going to do certain things, which means that you can make predictions about their behavior. That allows for little “a-ha!” moments that you don’t normally get in other games (though I’m excited for whenever they decide to break that rule). On the whole, though, Paris 1920 is a quick and pleasant deduction game with an overall quick playtime and a small footprint, which I also appreciate. It moves fast because everyone’s getting information every turn, and that’s a huge relief. Slow deduction games can be a bit boring since you need information to actually make inferences, and that’s thankfully not the case here. I was going to say that it’s even easy to expand, but there’s already an expansion for it! And two sequel games. Wild stuff. So we’ll see what happens in Cuzco 1450 next time we return to the series. Just, take my advice: let players finish the deduction when you play, even if they don’t win. It doesn’t add a lot of extra time but it lets everyone feel like a winner. You can even play the solo mode with multiple players like a cooperative game, if you want. You love to see it. So if you’re looking for another mystery to solve, you enjoy deduction games, or you just want to yell some Phantom of the Opera lyrics at someone while you’re playing a board game, I’d recommend checking out Kronologic: Paris 1920! It’s a lot of fun.

Looking for another mystery? Check out my Puzzle and Mystery Games Hub for more to solve!

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