Rough Justice: ’84 (v1.01)

Seneca City runs on neon, corruption, and favors, while your struggling private security agency tries to keep one step ahead of both the underworld and a hidden conspiracy. Rough Justice: ’84 blends the tactile feel of an ’80s tabletop strategy game with a pulpy crime-story campaign, casting you as the person assigning specialists to the city’s dirtiest jobs. The mood lands somewhere between a hard-boiled detective series and a well-worn board game box, complete with surveillance gadgets, dubious clients, and mounting pressure from enemies operating behind the scenes. Rather than playing a lone action hero, you manage the people who have to survive the job.

Each case begins with reading its requirements, selecting the right freelance operative, and judging whether their abilities can handle the assignment. Agents possess five distinct stats, and stronger ratings grant more dice during skill checks; success therefore depends on roster management as much as luck. Dice rolls resolve security work, fugitive captures, repossessions, and side jobs, while consumable gear cards can temporarily improve an agent’s odds at the cost of limited durability. Cases also break up the strategic planning with era-flavored minigames, including codebreaking, reflex tests, and practical analog-style challenges, so you are occasionally asked to perform the work rather than merely delegate it. Completing contracts earns rewards, broadens your operational capacity, and lets you recruit more talent for increasingly demanding workloads.

Its strongest idea is how it turns the unpredictability of a dice-driven board game into a campaign about calculated risk. A poor roll can hurt, but thoughtful agent selection, card use, and careful interpretation of a briefing usually matter more than blind chance. The comic-book visual presentation and retro-tech flavor give its city a personality that strategy games built around spreadsheets often lack, while the conspiracy plot adds momentum beyond chasing high scores. Fans of board-game adaptations, management-focused adventures, and the case-by-case structure of titles like This Is the Police should find plenty to enjoy, especially if they value planning over twitch combat.