Scotland Yard is a board game

Board game

A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...

 in which a team of players, as "police", cooperate to track down a player controlling a "criminal" around a board representing the streets of London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. It is named after Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...

, the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police Service

Metropolitan Police Service

The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial police force responsible for Greater London, excluding the "square mile" of the City of London which is the responsibility of the City of London Police...

. Scotland Yard is an asymmetric

Symmetric game

In game theory, a symmetric game is a game where the payoffs for playing a particular strategy depend only on the other strategies employed, not on who is playing them. If one can change the identities of the players without changing the payoff to the strategies, then a game is symmetric. ...

 board game, with the detective players cooperatively solving a variant of the pursuit-evasion

Pursuit-evasion

Pursuit-evasion is a family of problems in mathematics and computer science in which one group attempts to track down members of another group in an environment. Early work on problems of this type modeled the environment geometrically...

 problem. The game is published by Milton Bradley

Milton Bradley

Milton Bradley , an American game pioneer, was credited by many with launching the board game industry in North America with Milton Bradley Company....

 in the United States and Ravensburger

Ravensburger

Ravensburger Spieleverlag GmbH is a German game company. It is a leader in the European puzzle market.-History:The company was founded by Otto Robert Maier with seat in Ravensburg, a town in Upper Swabia in southern Germany. He began publishing in 1883 with his first author contract...

 in Germany and Canada. It received the Spiel des Jahres

Spiel des Jahres

The Spiel des Jahres is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the stated purpose of rewarding excellence in game design, and promoting top-quality games in the German market. It is thought that the existence and popularity of the award is one of the major drivers of the quality...

("Game of the Year") award in 1983. A sequel to Scotland Yard was released called "Mister X".

Gameplay

One player controls "Mr. X", a criminal whose location is only revealed periodically, and the other players each control a detective, which is always present on the board.

All players start with a number of tokens allowing them a certain number of moves using the following methods:

• Taxi
  Taxicab
  A taxicab, also taxi or cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice...
  
  s allow the player to move only one space for each token used. They can be used to reach any point in London, most of which are not accessible in this game by other means.
• Bus
  Bus
  A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
  
  es are available throughout most of the map, allowing longer-distance travel more quickly if the player is located at a bus-stop.
• The London Underground
  London Underground
  The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...
  
   in this game also allows quick travel between distant points of London. However, stations are far apart so the use of an underground ticket can narrow down the possibilities of Mr. X's location.
• Water routes are available, which only Mr. X can use, following the water buses' routes along the Thames between Greenwich
  Greenwich
  Greenwich is a district of south London, England, located in the London Borough of Greenwich.Greenwich is best known for its maritime history and for giving its name to the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time...
  
   and Whitehall
  Whitehall
  Whitehall is a road in Westminster, in London, England. It is the main artery running north from Parliament Square, towards Charing Cross at the southern end of Trafalgar Square...
  
  .

Each player (Mr. X and the detectives) draws one of 18 possible cards which show where a player has to start. The places are divided well enough so that Mr.X won't be caught in the first round of players moving.

Each detective begins with a total of 22 tokens. Once each transport token is used by a detective, it is turned over to Mr. X, effectively giving him unlimited transport. As he makes his moves, he writes them in a log book or any book and covers them with the tokens he uses, so that the detectives have clues as to his whereabouts. Mr. X also has five 'valid on any transport' black tokens, and two 'move twice this turn' cards. The water routes require a black token; when one of these is played, the detectives must consider whether or not it is being used to hide a river trip.

At five specific times during the game, Mr. X has to reveal his current position. Detectives will take this opportunity to refine their search and, if possible, plan ways to encircle him. From each known position, the types of transport used by Mr. X limit the number of possible locations he may be standing in, which provides useful information to detectives (as well as preventing some types of cheating by the fugitive player).

The game is won by the detectives if they catch Mr. X by landing on the same square as Mr. X's current location, or it may be won by Mr. X if he remains out of the grasp of detectives until they all are unable to move (which happens after 22 moves at the latest, since all detectives will have run out of usable tokens by this point).

Although the game says it is for 3-6 players many play this game with only 2 players. The police, when controlled by 1 person, are far more coordinated and have a better chance of catching Mr. X, which can be hard if you have 5 people trying to work together as the police.