POLICE AND THIEVES
Location: the street

With new DS releases drying up to a mere 40 or 50 a week, this year I’ve mostly been playing Scotland Yard, because I'm the classic example of an only child.

Mr. X is going to have a job stealing this.

Boardgames are brilliant fun, offering gameplay that’s been tried and tested over years or often decades, but are usually handled terribly on consoles. Seeking some justification for running on powerful electric machinery and costing twice as much as buying the physical version from a toyshop, they frequently swamp the gameplay in pointless bells, whistles and cutscenes (which the player is forced to instantly turn off in the options so that a single game of Monopoly doesn’t last for 14 hours), as well as imposing an unwavering rigidity of rules.

Worse still, some are so mean-minded and grasping that they make the economics of using the console to play them simply too farcical to bear – hello DS Scrabble, which eschews the eminently sensible and obvious possibility of multiple players passing round a single machine in favour of insisting that all players have their own individual DSes and copies of the game, raising the price of a four-player game of Scrabble from about a tenner for a real-life set to somewhere more in the region of £500. As a result of all the above, boardgame conversions rarely get reviewed anywhere, which is a bit of a shame as sometimes it means you might easily miss out on an absolute gem, and such is the case with Scotland Yard on the DS.

(Missing this particular gem is even more likely than usual, because at the time of writing it seems, rather oddly, to have had a European release but not a UK or US one.)

This is an original London boardgame board. Click the image for a full-size version.

The original board version is around 25 years old and has sold over 4 million copies worldwide yet isn’t terribly well-known outside of serious boardgaming circles. It’s a game of asymmetric warfare, in which one player (a Pink Panther-style thief called Mr X) has to move around a real-life city evading a team of detectives (numbering anywhere between two and five), while the detectives attempt to track his movements using only details of what forms of transport he’s using and occasional scheduled sightings. (Mr X is a very sporting crook, and rather kindly agrees to have his last location revealed to his pursuers every five turns or so.)

WoS isn't about to read the entire instruction manual to you – go and look on the internet for more info on Scotland Yard itself if you need it – but it’s a cleverly-designed, highly entertaining game (which explains the quarter-century lifespan and counting) with lots of balance and flexibility and no reliance on dice or chance except the random positioning of the characters at the start. It is, however, a bit of a pain to play in real life due to the preponderance of fiddly tickets and the difficulty of Mr X’s location having to be physically concealed. It’s exactly the sort of game, in other words, that someone ought to port to a console.