My wife and I played a game of Mr. Jack to start off our weekly session at CarcaSean. It’s a two-player game in which one of the players takes on the role of the infamous Jack the Ripper while the other player takes on the role of the detective trying to catch the murderer. The board represents the Whitechapel district of London and is populated by eight characters, all of whom are connected to the case in some way and any one of whom can turn out to be Mr. Jack. Yes, this means it’s possible that the murderer could be Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Lestrade.

The cool twist about this game is that both players take turns to control the same eight characters. Typically, the detective tries to arrange the characters such that the use of the Witness / No Witness card eliminates as many suspects as possible while the other player tries to prevent this. Quite unintuitively, I quickly found that, as the player in the Mr. Jack role, it is far easier to keep all of the characters in sight than trying to keep them out of sight. I messed up early because of this and eliminated a lot of characters from suspicion on the very first turn. Still, I did manage to keep my wife from guessing who the murderer was until the very last turn. Overall, a light but fun game. It is astonishing however how a game with such a simple ruleset can involve so much thinking.

Our main course for the evening was still Agricola which we played with Sean, using the I deck, the first time for all of us. The thing about Agricola with me is that immediately after finishing a game, I feel like playing a second time because of a conviction that I should be able to do better the second time around. Both of us like it so much that we’ve seriously talked buying a copy. The main argument against that is that we’d end up just playing it against each other, and my instincts tell me that two-player Agricola just doesn’t have enough competition in it to be consistently interesting.

Finally, with some encouragement from Sean, I spent some time today recording my boardgame plays so far on BoardGameGeek. The exact dates of some of the earliest plays are somewhat suspect and I’ve probably left off some plays of the games that we own but it should be pretty accurate otherwise. You can see the list here. As Sean says, it’s not like it serves any purpose, but I guess making lists is just the geeky thing to do. On a side-note, this is the list of games that Sean owns. That’s a lot of games!