Mr. Jack is a simple two-player deduction game for ages 9 and up with a dead hooker on the box cover. Depending on your personal tastes that may be all you need to know about this game, but assuming it isn’t I’ll continue. 8 investigators have shown up to the scene of Jack The Ripper’s latest crime in the hopes of finally putting an end to his reign of terror, but 1 of the 8 are not who they say. In fact, they’re Jack himself! No way! Yes way. Throughout the game, one player acts in the interest of the hidden Jack, keeping his identity secret by sowing confusion, while the other seeks to bring him to justice. Mr. Jack may sound exciting on paper, but iffy theming, nebulous player roles, and an overly restrictive design reduces its narrative to a slow, mismatched tug-of-war.
The game is played on a heavily-abstracted map of London with sewer entrances and street lamps scattered throughout. At each of the 4 corners is an escape route for Jack, 2 of which are cordoned off. The starting locations of the 8 investigators, covered sewer entrances, lit street lamps, and cordons are all predetermined and do not vary game to game. Before the game begins, the Jack player draws an “Alibi” card telling them which investigator they are impersonating. The investigators then have exactly 8 rounds to uncover Jack’s identity and catch him. If they fail to do so, guess wrong, or he escapes they lose (as does the player representing them, of course). Each round, 4 of the 8 “Character” cards are drawn and the players take turns selecting characters, moving them, and using their special actions. The bulk of the game’s tactics come from manipulation of these character powers. Turn order is non-traditional and follows an alternating you-me-me-you/me-you-you-me pattern, meaning whoever gets first crack at the round’s characters will also be the one stuck with the last one remaining.
At the end of each round, Jack must announce if he is currently visible or not. Visible in the game world of Mr. Jack means adjacent to a lit street lamp or another character. Using this announcement (amongst other things), the investigators will slowly whittle down their list of potential suspects until they find their man. To supply a little extra narrative oomph, the end of rounds 1-4 also see a street lamp being extinguished, making it a little easier for Jack to hide in the shadows (though he may not want to). During any of their turns, the non-Jack player may end the movement of an investigator on top of another to officially accuse them of being Jack The Ripper. Hopefully they are right or else they immediately lose.
As I mentioned, the core of the game are the character powers. These let you do a variety of things: move around the board in different ways, change the locations of lit street lamps, blocked sewer entrances, and police cordons, illuminate additional spaces, and even draw Alibi cards to certify the identities of innocent investigators. The problem is that some of these powers are unquestionably superior to others, and this lack of balance means that certain characters will almost always be selected first regardless of their board position. This causes the game to feel a bit scripted. And not even scripted in service of a great theme, because the ostensible theme here is largely decorative. For example, a character’s only ability is to move sewer covers around? That’s his only task in the relentless pursuit of the infamous Jack The Ripper? Letters From Whitechapel this is not. Mr. Jack is much, much closer to an abstract than it likes to let on.
There’s nothing wrong with abstracts, though, as long as they’re tense and filled with meaningful decisions. Mr. Jack isn’t. The entire game boils down to a very simple premise: the investigators want to keep the group split as evenly as possible between visible/invisible so when Jack announces his status they get the most amount of information. Jack wants the opposite: to keep the investigators as grouped up as possible on one side or the other and to be part of that larger group. Almost all of the movement in the game is to further one of those two objectives, so the game is much less about deduction than it is about rote spatial optimization puzzles. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Shouldn’t Jack be trying to escape? You’d think so, but no. Uneventfully, the Jack player is typically better off just biding their time and running out the clock. The stars have to align to make escaping a viable path to victory for Jack. First off, you have to have announced invisibility at the end of the previous round. Then, you have to hope that Jack’s character card is available, that your opponent doesn’t choose it before you, that you are close enough to an escape route to make it there in a single movement, AND that you’ve set up all these circumstances without drawing suspicion to your identity. Yeah, good luck with that. It’s a pretty serious design issue when a game’s most feasible path to victory is also its dullest.
Playing as the investigator isn’t too great, either. Think Chess, but you have to do a bunch of busywork first to figure out which piece is your opponent’s king. Half the time you don’t even care about the actions you’re taking, because you’re just forced into them circumstantially. You’ll move a character to make them visible and then be forced to move a street lamp or sewer cover even though it doesn’t matter. Or you’ll get stuck with a character that’s so far away from the action that your turn feels totally pointless. I’m sure there are ways to optimize even the most seemingly irrelevant actions, but when the decisions a game presents to you are so often removed from your actual goal it’s hard to care. Sure, the game allows for a fair amount of skillful play, but all functional strategy games do. Praising a strategy game for allowing skillful play is like praising a movie for being coherent. It’s not enough.
Ironically, one of the most common criticisms of Mr. Jack — even amongst its fans — is one I don’t personally share: its balance. Not because I think it IS balanced (it’s not), but because I don’t care that it’s not. On the contrary, I’d say there’s some pretty fertile ground to explore in the realm of purposefully unbalanced games. Memoir ’44 did it successfully and so can others. Let’s get some David & Goliath-type scenarios up in this hobby, yo! As long as the imbalances are properly considered and woven carefully into the design to make sure it’s still fun and exciting for everyone involved, it’s wide open territory as far as I’m concerned. Not every game needs ambitions of tournament play. Unfortunately in Mr. Jack‘s case, its imbalance is entirely accidental, as clearly indicated by some recent rules changes to address the issue. And since its imbalance is not the result of deliberate design decisions, nothing of any interest results from it. Which brings me to the real problem with Mr. Jack. It’s not interesting. It’s an overly parameterized sequence of hyper-similar spatial/mechanical riddles with a completely flat meta-game and off-putting artwork. Though you might be able to get some mileage out of it as a children’s or family game, you’re likely better off finding something to play that involves a few less dead hookers.
Mr. Jack gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.