[Board/Tactical Game]: Mr. Jack, reviewed by ShannonA (5/4)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13426.phtml

Shannon Appelcline's Summary:

A thoughtful two-player deduction game that's very original and allows for clever tactical play.

Go to the full review for more information.

[cfarrell]

What's your feeling on game balance?

I played this half-a-dozen times on a friend's copy, and we enjoyed it, but we never saw Jack win. He came close, a few times, but most games he never really had a credible threat.

This was really the main reason I didn't end up buying it - it wasn't inherently fun enough to play if one side was going to be greatly favored (the theming here is pretty thin).

It might just be one of those things, where there was a trick to playing Jack that we didn't discover, but it didn't seem like it was all that complex a game.

[ShannonA]

Generally, I suspect that Jack has a hard time of it, because it's pretty tricky to keep the suspects high enough to allow him to get away.

I would generally guess that the "trick" is to set him up so that he can escape, and to just use the deduction mystification as a stalling motion to do so, but I haven't played it enough to really get into that much.

[ldd23]

Have you ever played Praetorian? It's another abstract with a strong focus on deduction and shared pieces. Your description of Mr. Jack really reminded me of this one.

In Praetorian, one player plays an assassin and the other plays the police, trying to capture the assassin before they kill their targets. There are two police pieces that only the police player can move, and 24 common pieces that either player can move ("the crowd"). The assassin piece is one of the common pieces, but only the assassin player knows which one, and two of the other common pieces are targets. Again, only the assassin player knows which pieces are the targets. The assassin's goal is to kill both targets before the police player interrogates the assassin piece.

On each turn, the assassin player can ether move one of the crowd pieces or have the assassin kill a target who is adjacent to the assassin piece. The police player can move a cop, move a crowd member, or have each cop interrogate an adjacent crowd member to see if they're the assassin.

It's a pretty cool game, and can be played online at Super Duper Games.