As mentioned in my previous review Cluedo was a sort of revival of my boardgaming interest. I always enjoyed the mystery themed games (not sure was this after Cluedo though), but one of the problems with the Mystery games that I had before getting Mr. Jack was that they were all 3+ players and above. Both Cluedo and Mystery of the Abbey and it wasn't that I always used to have 3 people that I could play with. Also, I was looking at a shorter game ('cos Cluedo and MoA takes about 60-90 min).
After some reading around, I found the answer in Mr. Jack. Got it through a friend of mine from Singapore. This is a 2-player murder mystery themed game that takes about 5-10 min to learn and takes about 30 min to play.
Mr. Jack by Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc
Both Bruno and Ludovic are French game designers. Bruno has designed one of the most popular Co-operative games Shadows over Camelot (more about it some other day :-)...) and Ludovic has designed another popular game called Cash 'n' Guns a fun game like Bang!What do you get in the Box?
Well before I go to the content bit, I have to share how I felt after opening the box ;-) As I mentioned before I had read a few reviews about this game and thought that this was a simple enough game for 2 players. I wasn't completely into lot of strategic Euro games and hence wanted the game to be simple (things are different now though).
When I opened the box and saw the rule book, I almost fainted looking at the size of it!!!! It is a 38 page magazine!! and I thought that I had blown up money on this one. But don't fret :D as I realised moments later the rule book comes in 7 different languages and hence so big. In actuality the rule set is just 5 pages :-)
Now to the contents:
- You get a nice big board with lot of hexes
- 8 character tokens with suspect on one side (dark color) and innocent on the other side (white background)- Characters come from the popular Sherlock Holmes series like Sherlock, Dr. Watson etc.
- 6 hexagonal gas light tiles with 4 of them having numbers1-4 for removal after each of rounds 1-4
- 2 hexagonal manhole tiles
- 2 police cordon tokens
- 1 turn counter token
- 1 card witness/no witness indicator
- 8 cards with green back with the names and pictures of the character along with their special abilities
- 8 alibi cards with red back and picture of a character on each card
How does it play?
First let's look at the set up before we see the game play:
- Set out the board look the the cover page of the rule book to set out the gaslight markers, manhole markers, police cordon tokens and the starting positions of the 8 characters with their bright/darker side up
- Place the turn counter token on the bottom right corner of the board where it says 1
- Choose a player who is going to play lack- he gets the witness card and draws one of the character cards from the red back stack
- Shuffle the 8 green back stack and draw the top 4 cards and keep it open next to the board
- Ensure that the player playing Jack faces the grey side of the board (upside down) and the detective player faces the board upright (gold side)
On each turn the following happens:
- The turn order token tells you the order of play. Eg: Grey-Gold-Gold-Grey (for turns 2-4-6-8) or Gold-Grey-Grey-Gold (for turns 1-3-5-7)
- Players choose one of the open character cards depending on who they are representing (see above of grey and gold description)
- Players move the character tokens on the board as per the movement points for each character and use the character's special ability. E.g. Sherlock can move upto 3 places and draw a card from the red back pile etc.
- After a turn is over i.e. 4 cards the Jack player uses the witness card to indicate whether the culprit is visible or invisible.
- Once this is done, depending on whether the culprit is visible or invisible the tokens are turned around to indicate their innocence. Meaning- if the culprit is visible then all the invisible characters are innocent and vice verse
- The turn counter moves to the next number and one of the gas light is removes from the board (numbers 1-4 for each round)- i.e. your city is going get increasingly darker and becomes difficult for the detective to catch Jack ;-) so hurry up
- Any character adjacent to another character is visible
- Any Character adjacent to a gaslight is visible
- Any character in the line of sight of Dr. Watson's gaslight is visible
- All other characters are invisible
- Jack can escape the city only when he is invisible and through one of the exits that does not have the police cordon marker!
How long does this play?
Typically each game should last somewhere between 20-30 min, yes it is that short though my review makes the game appear long. In very rare circumstances I've seen games stretching upto 45 min (i.e. when I play this game with some serious chess players :-)
Who would you recommend it to?
I would categorise this game as a light-medium game and hence this can fit into most game collections with ease. Serious gamers can use this as an ice breaker before they want to get into something really serious and casual gamers can play this for hours before getting bored :-) I would say this is a great game for get away- so couples might find it very attractive, but if you are a person who plays games with larger groups and seldom play 2 player games, then you may not want it because this is a 2-player game :-)
Any Downsides?
Well I had to think long and hard before writing this section. Downside of such a nice game, well can it really have one? The answer to me was yes, and I say this as I have played this extensively for over 2 yrs now- One serious downside is games tend to become repetitive after you have played many times. There are actually 2-3 different strategies and once you crack them in your initial games the surprise element might die down. Playing with different players will give you different experiences as the style of play will be different, but you can nail down the trends after a point in time.
For beginners learning the movement abilities and special abilities might take a game or two, and if they play against experienced gamers there is a huge disadvantage. This game is also fairly unforgiving in that if anyone commits a simple error early in the game, you can be sure that your game is going to be short- specially true with errors made by players playing Jack.
Personally I feel that this game is not very well balanced- what I mean by this is, it is very difficult for Jack to escape and not get caught. After some games you know that Jack will get caught (experienced gamers) and the challenge is how long can Jack keep running away. For this I do play certain variants like playing it for 6 turns instead of 8, removing 2 lamps instead of 1 etc. but still the detective has a lot of advantage unless he plays really stupid.
Final Thoughts!
Well don't get carried away reading my downside section and dismiss this game as a flash in the pan. This is a very very good game and can keep you engaged for hours, days, years. Though I don't play it very often, I do see this game hitting my table every other month at least for a couple of games. Yes there are some drawbacks, but I guess there are very few games that are perfect. If you ask me this game is perfect to satisfy your mystery/deduction itch without brain burn within a short time! With an expansion and a full blown game released I can only imagine this game getting more and more popular! As I said before catch this Jack before he escapes from the market stands.
