As I've been playing through my latest wave of games, one of the ones I held out the most hope for was Mr. Jack
.In Mr. Jack, one of the players takes on the role of Jack the Ripper who is posing as a detective. The other player takes on the role of the detective who is trying to determine which person Jack is impersonating. (I have no idea why it is based on Jack the Ripper - it is basically Hide and Seek as a board game). Each round there will be 4 of the 8 characters flipped. Next the players alternate controlling these characters in a 1-2-1 pattern (I go, you go twice, I go again). To mix it up a little bit, each character also has a special ability like lighting gas lights, moving manhole covers, etc. Once all 4 characters have moved, the player who took on the role of Jack announces whether he is witnessed - and the detective then eliminates all of the characters that can logically be eliminated. This continues until 1) Jack escapes (he had to not un-witnessed the previous round), 2) the detective accuses a character (if he is right he wins, if he is wrong he loses), or 3) 8 rounds have passes and Jack has not been caught.
The biggest pro of this game is that it is a game with actual gameplay value that could be played with children. Now, with that said, for some reason the publishers decided to name it after Jack the Ripper! I have no idea why this is. They took a game that is incredibly kid-friendly and named it after a mass murderer... bravo. (Just gloss over this fact with your kids). Either way, there is a decent amount of strategy and thinking that goes on in the game, and yet the rules and gameplay are simple enough that it could be played with just about anyone - it says 9+, but I wouldn't really be shocked if a 7 or 8 year old could play it.
The other thing that I liked about Mr. Jack was that they added enough variety to each of the different characters that you actually must determine what the best moves are from round to round. It is interesting to try to figure out the best way of having Jack blend in (or completely isolated depending on which role you're playing). All of the different character abilities were used and important in the games that I played, and so I liked that there weren't any characters that were useless.
Now for the gigantic con (if I only have one, shouldn't it at least be large?). I thought that the gameplay got stale pretty quickly. There aren't that many different ways that you can try to hide. Here's the strategy: if you're the detective, split the characters that you are unsure of into as even of groups between witnessed and un-witnessed as possible to eliminate the most each round; if you're Jack, do the opposite. How many times do you need to do this?
Overall, I give Mr. Jack a 7.5/10. For a game that can be played with kids, I think that it's phenomenal (thus the high review - if it were for adults only, I'd give it something closer to a 6.0). With that said, I don't have kids, so I don't really plan on keeping my copy.
If you're looking for games that can be easily taught, you might try the Monopoly Deal game, as well as Sorry! Sliders (which is a dexterity game), and Ticket to Ride.
