After the moves:
Jack is at 99!
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First round trace:
I think there was a crucial moment when you failed to search 89.
Second round trace:
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Woo! That was so lucky! @pillbox - you really had us scrambling for the first round, and I really thought you had faked us out the second round. I fully expected these arrests to come up blank. Nice game.
@RogerBW - Thanks for running, it was a lot of fun!
@captbnut - Great job, partner!
My wife says that throwing my arms up and saying, “We win!” is not an appropriate thing to do right after checking lottery numbers (which I had just done). I can’t argue with that…
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Thanks all @COMaestro glad you were on it. I seemed to veer between being right on top of this and being a buffoon.
@pillbox you were a criminal mastermind, finding the clue at 122 (iirc) was such dumb luck and brought as back in to it.
Thanks @RogerBW for running the game, really enjoyed it
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Really enjoyed spectating this, good job all round!
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I caught some lucky breaks but in the end I was just outwitted fair and square. Without realizing it, you had perfectly surrounded my SW drop and I was out of time, so I made the drop at 123 knowing that on your very next turn, you could suss out my whereabouts rather quickly. So that forced me to Carriage (mostly as a ruse) and then Alley way (definitely as a ruse) with the hopes that I could just circle around for a bit in the areas you had already checked to do the drop at 71.
I was reluctant to use my 2nd alleyway move as it was, in my mind, pivotal to beating you to the SE; e.g. alleyway from 126 to 142 so that I could then boat across the Thames to do the final drop.
Unfortunately my plan to run in circles was interrupted by Yellow blocking my planned route at 83, 85, 103, which forced me down a less than brilliant alternate… which was ultimately my undoing.
EDIT: and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you professional criminal investigators doing their job! I’m starting to think doing cool murder crimes just isn’t worthwhile?
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I’ve seen several tense games end in the south-west - sometimes with a cunning Boat move across St James’s Park Lake to make people think Jack was in the south-east!
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Out of curiosity, do you have to pick four places to do your drops at the beginning of the game, or do you just drop whereever? I haven’t read the rules for this game, only Letters from Whitechapel (which I own, but barely ever get to play).
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You lock in the four locations, but you can do them in any order you like.
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@pillbox is it fun to play as Jack? I could imagine you giggling with glee when @COMaestro and I were tying ourselves up in knots in completely the wrong locations. And how annoyed you must have been when we stumbled on you by chance.
For quite a light game, there’s quite a lot of strategy for Jack IMO - picking the dump sites near places that are hard for investigators to get to but easy to escape from must be very difficult. Also, knowing when to use the actions - I assume we were very close to an arrest when you double moved at the start of the game?
Thanks again all.
With 20/20 hindsight you’d have been better switching your alley and carriage moves after the reveal. I can’t remember where we were, but a simple move to 105 and then alley could have taken you anywhere from 126 to 119. Follow that with a double and you could have been miles away.
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Is that St James’s Park? I was sure that was the Serpentine
This is the rough area:
There are some differences, but a while back I had a search and the game map seemed to be reasonably consistent with the contemporary street plan.
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Yes, you’re definitely right. Looking at that map has made me desperate to visit London again (although it doesn’t take much)
What are you using for the images for this PBF - is it something you’ve written yourself, or TTS?
I extracted the map, “Jack”, and special movement card images from the rulebook PDF. The policeman’s helmet I found as clip-art last time I ran this (on the SU&SD forum) because I think it’s easier to parse at low resolution than a coloured figure. Everything is put together in Inkscape, where the “discovery site” and “clue” markers are just bordered circles with reduced opacity; then I export from the master SVG file to a bitmap for posting here.
I use Inkscape rather than The Gimp for most of my PBF games even if they’re working entirely with bitmaps, because each object is a separate thing which can be moved around independently of other objects. It’s as if each item were in its own layer, but without the faff of switching to the right layer and then moving it.
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I think it’s a blast to play as Jack. It is, however, a bit nerve wracking.
The only glee came early on when I was given a pristine opportunity to move freely between the investigators. The glee was short-lived and I immediately needed to use the carriage move to slip away.
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