Pier Pressure: Modrophenia

I know close to nothing about the Mods, and certainly don’t have any nostalgic resonance with the sub-culture. Even so, the exuberance and ubiquity of the Sixties patterns and designs were irresistible.

If you’re not familiar with the history, the Mods and the Rockers were rival gangs that clashed violently in Brighton on more than one occasion. In Modrophenia, you’re investigating the death of a fellow Mod, and need to construct a timeline of his movements leading up to his murder. In practice, this means identifying a location he was in for each hour through the day in question, sometimes by finding out more about what he was up to and sometimes via a puzzle that resolves to a time plus a location. It might be difficult keeping track of the answers you’ve gathered, but the room provides a system that makes that easy, and gives you a strong sense of closing in on the complete set of answers.

This is a very parallel design with a clear structure, where a team can split up to cover more ground. There’s a great deal to do, more than might be immediately apparent, but even so we played as a three and finished with quarter of an hour left; enthusiast players should be fine taking it on as a two.

The usual downside to a parallel design is the risk of getting stuck on multiple puzzles at once, such that you end up needing multiple hints in a row – but that didn’t happen on our playthrough.

Modrophenia is about fun more than aesthetics, and was the plainest-looking of the Pier Pressure games I’ve played – but it was also immediately involving and thoroughly charming. I’ll admit to the usual positive bias that comes when a game happens to click for a team, since we blasted through it at some speed; but being something of a puzzle-fest, it should be a good choice for more experienced teams.