The Cold Case series came to us from Jim and Adam Symonds, a father-and-son inventing team located in England. The basic idea came from having played other cold-case-type games, in which there’s only one way to solve each game. Jim and Adam didn’t like how, if you missed a clue, you were out of luck for solving the game. As a result, you’ll notice that every Cold Case game has a number of clues that can help lead back to the identity of the killer.
These games were being developed in quarantine, which produced some interesting challenges. A particular difficulty was in getting the photographs we needed. Lockdown in England is much more rigorous than that in the US, so the inventors were prevented from going on research trips or photographing in indoor locations as they had originally intended. ThinkFun worked some Photoshop magic and took some of our own photographs, with guidance from the inventors on what they needed, to fill in the gaps.
Our Art Design team felt strongly that the games should accurately reflect the time period in which they’re set. Luckily a number of our staff have fond memories of growing up in the 80’s, and so were able to accurately replicate graphics and documents from that time! The Product Manager needed a lot of guidance on this point as she was only born in 1993.
A lot of our staff is interested in true crime, and so we wanted to be respectful in the ways we handled the delicate issues that arise in all the games. We hope that we have done them justice.
Other Interesting Facts about the Cold Case series:
* As there are so many characters in each game, and some who only appear once or twice and don’t have much significance, some of our team members have worked their own names into the game.
* ThinkFun translates games into dozens of languages. With a game where there’s so much writing like this, there’s a lot of translation needed, but we have to be really careful when translating not to ruin any of the puzzles! The Product Management team kept a running document of every scrap of text in the game, where they highlighted things that must be accounted for, where the clues are, how they function and what they mean in the larger context, as well as place and people’s names that shouldn’t be translated. It’s all a bit tricky because if you think about it, if a crime takes place in a small town in the UK, there’s no reason the local newspaper for that town, or the police records, would ever be translated to German or Spanish—but still, we try to do as honest a job of it as possible!
Suitable for ages 14+
1 - 4 players
