Last Week's Games: 221B Baker Street, Ultra Street Fighter II

Last week me and Kirsty tried a board game out for the first time – 221B Baker Street.

The smell of freshly-printed
card was curiously absent...

This game, as you might expect, is built around the Sherlock Holmes property; not something either Kirsty or I have much investment in but from what I understand, Sherlock Holmes was the progenitor for a lot of how certain kinds of modern fiction were developed – detective stories, of which I’ve enjoyed many even if I can’t remember many of them, and also the “buddy cop” trope where the protagonists are polar opposites in terms of personality and approach, and this variation is often what leads to the results. The actual game presents you with a murder mystery, and the gameplay loop revolves around visiting different places in London to find different clues – some are word games that point to the solutions, and others are background information to support the given facts.

Now, there’s two ways you can play this – competitive or collaborative. The former involves up to six players using a die to move around the board, arriving in different locations and receiving their respective clues. You can also play a “Scotland Yard” card to block players from visiting certain areas, and a “Skeleton Key” card to remove the blocks. If you think you know the answer – usually the name of the murderer, the murder weapon and the motive – you travel back to 221B Baker Street, reveal your answer, and if you get it right, you win the game.

A board game without dice may seem a little odd,
but the visual representation helped.

However, Kirsty and I chose to play it in the collaborative way, where we travel to the different locations finding the clues and try to solve the mystery in as few moves as possible. You’re graded on how many turns it takes – a maximum of 14, and a minimum of 1, and you need to get between 1-5 to get the highest grade of Master Detective. Straight away this presented some mechanical differences – we eschewed the die, as there was no need to randomly determine how long it would take us to get to a location once we’d agreed where we were going. We also managed without the Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key cards as well, since there was nobody competing against us to block off. Finally, we saved ourselves a lot of time – the instructions were talking about roughly an hour and a half for one game, we managed it in 30 minutes. Instead, we focussed our attention on the clues themselves, trying to work out what they represent and working out the answer. The first case, we didn’t do very well – we got the worst possible grade of Watson, but we were struggling with the motive and it didn’t become clear until we’d gone around all the locations. The second case went much better; I think we were more familiar with the gameplay by then!

Straight away, Kirsty began wondering whether we can run this game online – if you’re reading this in the future, either when Covid-19 has been eradicated or when it’s caused the downfall of the entire human race and the ants have taken over, we have limited social contact in these times and much of it is over Zoom. We have done a few social deduction games with some friends and family, but a collaborative effort like this might make a nice change. Not bad given that the only reason we bought the game was because we’d accidentally bought each other two copies of the same games for Christmas 2019!

Fei Long's quick attacks make him
absolutely nails...

Elsewhere, I played Ultra Street Fighter 2 with Jessie. This was one of the first games I had on the Nintendo Switch, and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’d been doing Street Fighter for about 25 years at that point, and there was nothing new in there other than Way of the Hado. Playing it with my four-year old daughter was… interesting. Of course, I could have flattened her straight away if I’d wanted to, but that wouldn’t have been fun for either of us. Instead, I held back a bit and found Jessie’s unpredictability a refreshing challenge on the game! We didn’t need to play it for very long, but we enjoyed the time we had nonetheless.