Mr. Jack- Time's short, catch Jack the Ripper if you can!

I was contemplating on which game should I review next and that's when it occurred to me that I could continue my review with the Mystery/Deduction genre of games and hence Mr. Jack!

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

The quality of the components are top notch with really thick cards and absolutely brilliant art work! In fact I'm wrong in calling these cards as cards, they are really really thick boards!

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)

Now we are all set to play :-) If you noticed I haven't mentioned the objective of this game. Well if you read the above section of set up that gives you the clue to the game. One of the 8 characters is Jack the Ripper i.e. the card the Jack the Ripper player chooses is the culprit. The other player has to find out this guy, and to make matter tense you have just 8 turns in which to do that! Of course did I mention that if Jack is clever he will escape from the city (board) even before you get to the 8 turns!! So buckle up you are in for a roller coaster ride!

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

Note on Visibility:

• 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!
  

Now for the fun element- Well it is extremely important for players to use the gas lights to their advantage and also the manholes. Using manholes can absolutely turn things around for players. There is no luck element in using the manholes, but there is surely a surprise element! Add to this the special abilities of the characters are really important and if used wisely can enrich the gaming experience immensely.

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.

Cluedo- Prof. Plum, in the Studio using a Candle Stick!

I guess I would be wring calling this a review. This game is so popular that it doesn't need a review. For more than 60 yrs this Parker Brother's game has intrigued people and I should add, is still continuing to do so. I say a great game to introduce mystery genre games for newbies (3-6 players)

I have lot of people on Boardgame Geek tell that Settlers of Catan was a genre breaking game that actually got a lot of them back to boardgaming. But I'm a little different. Coming from India, my knowledge of boardgames was extremely limited to say the least and this game actually got me into boardgaming and hence a special affiliation towards Cluedo :-)

I was probably one of those in India who had no clue about this game, though some of my friends had played it years ago. Unfortunate is all that I can say. But all this changed when a friend of mine showed me this game in Target or Big W in Melbourne i.e. during B-School days. He said "why don't we pick this game up for our weekend?" We were supposed to have some friends at my home and spend time and he suggested that this was an interesting game.

This set the ball rolling :-)

Cluedo the age old game of mystery and intrigue has reached immense heights where people host Cluedo Parties, murder Mystery parties etc. All that is required is to identify a hypothetical murder that has taken place- you need to tell who don it, with what weapon and in which room. In fact there has been many better murder mystery games after this, but to me this stays close to my heart!

BTW, this is available across all stores in India and don't wait to read this review to buy this game :-) If you look at my pictures you can probably make out how worn out this game is- i.e. how much I've played this :-)

Cluedo or Clue by Anthony E. Pratt

Anthony E. Pratt (August 10, 1903 - April 9, 1994) was an English game designer who is credited with creating the popular board game Clue. He came up with the game idea while working as a fire warden during World War II in Leeds. He was inspired to create the game by Geoffrey Bull, inventor of the board game Buccaneer. (Boardgame Geek)

What do you get in the Box?



This game perhaps comes in so many flavors that I really can't say with certainty that there are the things in the box. But the Parker Brothers version that I have has the following:

• Nice big game board depicting 9 rooms
• 6 colored pieces representing 6 different characters (Ms. Scarlet, Mrs. White, Prof. Plum, Col. Mustard etc.)
  
• 6 miniature weapons (knife, revolver, candle stick, rope, wrench, lead pipe)
• 9 room cards
• 6 weapon cards
• 6 character cards
  
• Dice and deduction sheets

Neat components. Also you can download deduction sheet from BGG whenever you run out of it or create your own.

How does it play?

• Each player chooses a character, gets deduction sheet and start off from their respective character's starting position
• one card at random is chosen from each of the 3 stacks i.e. character, weapon, room) and set aside. This is what is needed to be deduced.
• The rest of the cards are distributed among the players and it doesn't matter if is it unevenly distributed.
  
• Ms. Scarlet starts 1st, else choose a way that you like
• Throw the dice and move the counter towards the entrance of any of the rooms that you want to enter
• Once a player is at the door step others can't enter the room
• Another player cannot enter the room already having a detective by throwing a dice
• How ever other characters can be summoned by detectives on their turn to the room that they are currently present
• Players can suggest/suspect using the following combination- Character name- Weapon- The current room that they are in. Eg. Scarlet-revolver-kitchen (assuming the player is in kitchen)
• Players can suspect/suggest themselves as well i.e person playing Scarlet can suspect Scarlet themselves
  
• Note: Players cannot suggest that the murder happened in another room by staying in one- so you cannot stay in Study while suggesting the murder happened in Ballroom
• After a player makes a suggestion he/she goes round the table asking if anyone has an objection to that combination. If they have they must prove it showing one of the cards of the combination (i.e in case more than one card of the combination used). Remember all players have to be truthful when it comes to objecting and cannot bluff.
• Play continues like this round the table until a time when someone comes forward to accuse- Each player gets just one chance to accuse. i.e by accusing you are publicly saying that you know he combination of room, character and weapon and you take a look at the hidden cards. If you are right you win, else you are out of the game. Even if you lose you have to be present in the game to show the clues to others. So be very sure before making an accusation
  
• If you have a winner, people can decide if they want to continue the game or each one can go and make an accusation (this is how we play)

People use some interesting strategies like using clues from their hand and trying to mislead others into believing that the combination is a strong possibility of being the right answer ;-)

How long does it play?

This game usually takes somewhere between 45 min to 75 depending on how experienced your group is. But this game is fun so don't worry about the time :-)

Who do you recommend it to?

Well, I would like to say that this game is for all. But yes, if you are starting out on boardgaming and have no idea about what board games are, you should not miss this one. Yes I do accept that there are better games, but this is surely one of the good games. If people have been playing it for more than 60 yrs, I surely believe that there is substance to play this game.

Any Downsides?

Having said that this game is fun, enjoyable etc. this game is not without flaws. One thing that really makes this game annoying after you become comfortable is the dice mechanism- unnecessarily slows things down. This is where games like Mystery of the Abbey- MoA (which I own as well) scores over Clue. After many plays you'll exactly know that there are 3-4 different strategies to crack this and it is just a matter of time before someone cracks it. Again games like MoA or American Werewolf or Werewolves of Miller's Hollow (the last 2 are very different to MoA and Clue) scores. Some people find it hard to keep track of things on the small deduction sheet. Some people have also complained that this game is more of an elimination than deduction. But honestly I have played this close to 80 times and still don't mind playing it, though the preference has gone down a bit.

Final Thoughts!

This game got me into Board gaming and just for that reason alone, I'll not be getting rid of this game :-) I still get kicks playing this, but definitely enjoy MoA more due to the mechanics involved and the complexity involved. Having said that I would say this game should be played by everyone in case you have not played it before. I really don't mind if you don't want to buy, but not playing this is a crime :-)