How to play
Play a case in miniature: read the opening, choose where to go, find the discovery, sign the report. The real rules of Half Story, in five minutes.
A new case every Monday
Every Monday morning there is a new case in Calder, and you have a week to work out who did it.
The Monday after, the leaderboard freezes and the case moves to the archive: you can still play it, out of the running, but only whoever solves it reads the solution.
Below is a case in miniature, written to let you try. Open it.
Crate 19
It starts with reading
Every case starts with an opening in the second person: the call, the walk, the scene. Reading it is not a move, and you can reread it whenever you like.
There are names inside the text. Every place is somewhere to go, and every person takes you to the place where you find them.
Monday, seven forty. The caretaker Teo Marr finds the door of Customs Warehouse 4 ajar and a shelf empty: crate 19 is missing, the one with the red seals. No lock has been forced.
On last night's shift log there is one name only: Nora Vance, from the Inventory Office, who left at half past nine for the Pier Bar.
Every name is somewhere to go: a place, or the person you find there.
The first time is a move
Nobody tells you where to start. The city is made of places, and in each place you find the people who work there or spend their day there: to talk to someone, go where they are. Nothing marks the places that matter from the ones that don't.
The first time you enter a place you spend a move. Moves never run out: they count at the end, in the leaderboard, where whoever reaches the truth with fewer moves climbs.
Rereading where you have already been is not a move.
Start at the Pier Bar.
The city doesn't repeat, it adds
Every now and then something you read changes the picture: it is a discovery. It is not a point to collect, it is there to send you back: with a discovery in hand, a place you have already visited has something more for you. Going back is a new visit, so it is a new move.
And then there is the rest of the city, which has nothing to do with it. Ruling things out is half the job: what you have set aside you mark as irrelevant and get it out of your way.
Nora Vance looks up from her ledger. "I left at half past nine, had a coffee at the Pier and went home. I never let go of my badge: I keep it round my neck, see."
Nora Vance's badge opened the warehouse door at 23:10.
The two don't fit together. With this discovery in hand, the Inventory Office has something more for you: going back is a new visit, so it is a move.
Everything you read stays
Every visit, every discovery, every exclusion lands in the notebook by itself. You don't have to take notes: you only have to decide where to go.
It fills up by itself with your moves.
The city's version
There is the local paper too, the Calder Ledger, telling its own version of the facts. Reading it is not a move.
Believing it is your choice.
Warehouse 4 theft: a gang is being sought
A crate under customs seal vanished overnight from Warehouse 4 in Eastbank. Harbour sources speak of a job prepared for weeks and of a gang arrived from outside.
The caretaker, who locked up as usual at ten, noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Enquiries continue.
0 moves
Only right or wrong
When you think you've got it, you try to close the case. The questions come one at a time and each one builds on what you have already settled: that's why you don't see them all at once.
Nobody confesses. Whoever lies keeps lying even in front of the evidence: you find the answer yourself, by putting together what you have read.
We only tell you whether you answered right or wrong, never what the answer was. In the real game, whoever gets it wrong waits five minutes before trying again; the questions you have already got right stay right.
Here there is one question, and you can try again straight away.
Who opened the door of Warehouse 4 at 23:10, and left it open?
The real case is waiting
In the leaderboard, whoever reaches the truth with fewer moves climbs, and every wrong attempt weighs more than a move. The optimal path through this case was three moves.
The case of the week is bigger: a dozen places, four or five suspects, a few more questions. Same rules.