The three-source city loop

Zoom into any single city in the mainline games and the structure repeats: a handful of locations to visit before deciding where to fly next. The original 1985 manual puts it plainly — “every city has three locations, which change case by case.” Later games kept the shape and varied the count and the labels, but the underlying idea never changed: more stops means more clues, and more clues cost time. The U.S.A. manual describes the same interface in its own terms: clicking the Show icon opens a window containing three specific locations to investigate.

Three ways to dig, not three places to stand

At each stop, the games typically offer the same three ways of gathering intelligence, whatever they're labelled that year. Where in Europe's manual lists them as Question Witness, Search Scene, and Call Tipster; the Deluxe remake of the original renames the third option Call Crime Net, Brøderbund's name for ringing up the wider agency network rather than the person standing in front of you. Questioning a witness gets a firsthand account; searching turns up whatever was left at the scene itself; calling brings in secondhand word from elsewhere — often the thinnest of the three leads, but sometimes the only one that breaks a stalled case.

Not every stop pays off equally

None of the three is guaranteed to hand you something useful, and the manuals are candid about the trade-off: check every option at every stop and you gather more trait and destination information, but “the more investigating you do, the more valuable time you lose.” Skilled play means learning which of the three tends to pay off first for a given case rather than grinding through all of them on reflex. In the North Dakota spin-off the loop survives almost unchanged — investigate landmarks, talk to witnesses, then head to the next stop — even though the whole game trades airports for gas stations.