You can choose if you want to play cooperative or competitive. To my taste, the best and funniest way to play the game is to read aloud the general story, check and distribute all the available hints and to try to find the murder together as a team. Everybody tries to make sense of the first evidences, reads some of the information, looks at the pictures, gathers intelligence and tells the other players what new conclusions she or he has found out.

Click on image to enlarge!

It's more than helpful to have smartphones or tablets on the table. This does not only make sense, it's even necessary to solve the puzzle. First I was a little bit disappointed as I normally try to banish the nasty electronic devices from my boardgame table. But here the smartphone feels right and contributes a lot to the realistic atmosphere. Even Facebook and Twitter can be asked and who knows, maybe a smartphone can also be used in a more traditional way, who knows...

Click on image to enlarge!

Like my first adventure with Carl Notebeck (see my review of Detective Stories: The Fire in Adlerstein) Detective Stories – Stillsee is a great detective game. For a grown-up playing round it is a much better choice than all those Exit games out there. Don't get me wrong: I like the Exit and other Escape games, but the Detective Stories are much more like real life. And it's great to combine the game with the real world, using the electronic possibilities of the modern world. Only an isolated cottage with no connection to the internet will not be the perfect place to play the game. The story continues, the third case is slightly more complex than the first one and it needs a little bit more time to solve the riddle. But it's great, I definitely want to have more of it!