Quick Impressions: Scotland Yard

Last Sunday, Alex and I had a bit of a reunion with our old college gaming buddies Jeff and Hershel. We played some old favorites (Tongiaki and Small World) and also had the opportunity to try out one that was new (to us), Scotland Yard. It's actually an older game by modern board game standards: having won the 1983 Spiel des Jahres, it's a rare '80s strategy game that endures in popularity today. Released before the Settlers of Catan-led explosion in the popularity of Euro-style games around the turn of the century, Scotland Yard lacks the contemporary Euro-gamey feel of skill/chance balancing and constant player re-balancing and multiple paths to victory but presents a complex and intriguing strategic foundation for three decades of Euro games.

In Scotland Yard, one player takes on the role of the notorious criminal Mr. X, and the rest of the players play detectives trying to track him down. Scotland Yard is essentially graph theory put into board game form; each player occupies one vertex of a fictionalized street map of London, and if a detective ever occupies the same position as Mr. X, the detectives win as a team. But if Mr. X evades capture for twenty-four turns, he wins. The rules are simple: players move from vertex to vertex via a variety of modes of transit, but each player only has a limited number of "tickets" for each mode. The big catch is that Mr. X shows up only once every three to five turns, with the detectives left to guess where he has gone in the interim.

From a game design perspective, the most distinctive thing about Scotland Yard is that it's a pure-strategy, practically zero-variance game. The only random element in Scotland Yard is its initial setup, where each detective and Mr. X can start on one of about twenty different spots on the map (there are two hundred in total). Afterwards, there's no chance in the game at all; every move has to take place on an ever-expanding graph of possible moves.

The strategy quickly becomes for the detectives to fan out and reach Underground stations (which allow the fastest movement across the map) until Mr. X shows himself, then try to cast a tightening net around Mr. X. As a result, the game's difficulty is a direct function of how many players there are. Some of the distribution of turns and tickets is rebalanced for more or fewer players, but in general a game with three players (or two detectives) becomes very easy for Mr. X to win, while a game with six players (five detectives) is a lot tougher.

We played with three detectives plus Mr. X, and for about seventeen turns, we detectives were thoroughly beaten. When Mr. X revealed himself at turn 18, though, we were able to narrow down his location such that when he made a mistake at turn 19, we had all his possible routes of escape covered and won the game. It was a slightly less-than-fulfilling way to win, taking advantage of an unforced error rather than putting together a brilliant strategy, and but for that ill-advised trip on the Underground, we surely would have lost.

Scotland Yard is built around one simple mechanic, and it executes that mechanic very well. The complete lack of variance during the game leads to some nice intensity as you pit your strategic skills and bluffs directly against those of your friends. It would be a tough game to play more than once of in a single sitting--partially because it's easy to reach a saturation point with the limited mechanics, and partially because the strategizing actually does get a little mentally taxing. But it plays quickly, and it's easy enough to teach to non-gamers, making it a viable alternative to Puerto Rico for a group you'd normally play Anomia with.

3-6 players, 30-60 minutes, $40 at a game shop or $28 on Amazon