Scotland Yard (board game)

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Scotland Yard
The Scotland Yard board
Players	3–6
Age range	10+
Setup time	5–15 minutes
Playing time	1 hour (player dependent)
Random chance	initial set-up
Skills required	Tactics, Strategy, and Bluffing

Scotland Yard is a board game in which a team of players, as "police", cooperate to track down a player controlling a "criminal" around a board representing the streets of London. It is named after Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police Service. Scotland Yard is an asymmetric board game, with the detective players cooperatively solving a variant of the pursuit-evasion problem.

[edit] Gameplay

One player controls "Mr. X", a criminal whose location is only revealed periodically, and the other players each control a detective, which is always present on the board.

Taxi, bus and underground 'tickets'

All players start with a number of tokens allowing them a certain number of moves using the following methods:

Taxis are expensive and only allow the player to move a short distance per unit of 'currency' [card/token]. However, taxis can be used to reach any point in London, most of which are not accessible in this game by bus or tube.
Buses are available throughout most of the map, allowing longer-distance travel more quickly if the player is located at a bus-stop.
The London Underground in this game also allows quick travel between distant points of London. However, stations are far apart so the use of an underground ticket can narrow down the possibilities of Mr. X's location.
Water routes are available, which only Mr. X can use (using a black ticket), using the water buses' routes along the Thames between Greenwich and Whitehall. When Mr. X uses a water-borne transport, the number of locations he can be at is narrowed quite considerably. Therefore, when Mr. X uses a "valid on any transport" black card, it is often the subject of debate whether this was used to obscure a river trip.

Once each transport token is used by a detective, it is turned over to Mr. X, effectively giving him unlimited transport. Mr. X also has a small number of 'valid on any transport' tickets, and 'move twice this turn' tickets.

After his third move, and then every fifth move, Mr. X has to reveal his current position. Detectives will take this opportunity to refine their estimates for his position, and plan ways to encircle him if possible. From each known position, the types of transport used by Mr. X limit the number of possible locations he may be standing in, which provides useful information to detectives (as well as preventing some types of cheating by the fugitive player).

The game is won by the detectives if they catch Mr. X by landing on the same square as Mr. X's current location, or it may be won by Mr. X if he remains out of the grasp of detectives until they all are unable to move (which happens after 24 moves at the latest, since there should be no more transport tokens left for the detectives).