B] The Deduction Phase – The Watchers now discuss the information seen in the 8 Window cards. As each day has its own board, they can also review the information that they saw on previous Days. As a group, the Watchers put Resident tokens and Attribute tokens in the 8 spaces (found in the area between the buildings). Each particular tile can only be placed once each day. During this phase, the Watchers can also use one of their 4 special Watcher Placard special abilities. Each of these can only be used once a game; so be sure that you are choosing the right time to use each! If this is Day 4, and they Watchers believe that a Murder has happened – this is the only day where the would place the Murder attribute token in the suspected apartment.

If you liked Mysterium or similar games ( Shadows: Amsterdam, Obscurio) that involve this sort of guesswork in the guise of deduction, you may love Rear Window. It looks great, which is even important given what a table hog it becomes after all four day boards are in play, and the components are good quality. I just think a deduction game should have more actual deduction, where you understand what’s been eliminated and can use logic to move forward to make better guesses. Soon after, the neighbor’s dog is found dead. The distraught owner yells and everyone runs to their windows except Thorwald, who sits quietly in his dark apartment. Certain that Thorwald killed the dog, Jeff telephones him to lure him away so that Stella and Lisa can investigate. He believes Thorwald buried something in the flower bed and killed the dog because it was digging there. When Thorwald leaves, Lisa and Stella dig up the flowers but find nothing. The Director wins if the Watchers guess 6 or 7 attributes correctly but do NOT guess the Murder attribute Before I go any further, I should note that there are two different modes in the game (and only the Director knows which version is being played!). If there is NOT a murder token on the solution board, then the game is a full cooperative game, and the Director’s goal is to get the Watchers to correctly identify all 8 pieces of information (the residents which live in each apartment and the attribute associated with that resident) during the four days of the game. If there is a murder token, then the game is semi-cooperative – with both the Director and the Watchers having different win conditions, while there is still a situation where all players lose together.

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The fact that the game master can’t tell players more information about what they got right among each day’s guesses only exacerbates the problem. A raw number from 0 to 8 isn’t helpful—well, 8 would be helpful, but even 7 just tells the players one is wrong without any further indication—and there’s no other mechanism to narrow that down except for the players’ single token that lets them ask whether one specific guess was right. The players have a few helpers taken straight from the movie to assist them throughout the game that can each be used once. L.B. Jeffries, the protagonist of the film, allows players to discard a face down window card and have it replaced by the director with a new clue. Detective Doyle, Jeffries war buddy, allows players to ask if one action tile or resident token on any day is correct. The director must answer truthfully, even if his goal is to mislead the watchers. Lisa Fremont, Jeffries’ love interest played by Grace Kelly in the movie, allows players to select a card from any day for the director to place an arrow pointing out the most important thing in that photo. Finally, Stella McGaffery, Jeffries’ nurse, allows players to look at all the face down cards placed on a given day which comes in handy if the players believe the director is trying to deceive them… That being said, without the potential murder complicating the game, it might actually be far too straightforward as a cooperative deduction game. As such, the gameplay experience lands somewhat in the middle; it’s always fun to play and fairly challenging but can also feel as though the game is cheating players through no fault of their own. Final Thoughts: Well, from the sound of it Rear Window Game feels a bit like a riff on Mysterium, a game that relies on secret information and non-verbal communication. The team on Polygon’s Overboard certainly enjoyed themselves, but Mysterium can be hit or miss depending on who’s sitting behind the screen. Time will tell if Prospero Hall can make a similar concept sing. There is a lot of detail on the cards, and I have found that it is quite easy to give misleading or incorrect signals – due to so many different things being shown on the cards repetitively – understandably so as there is a fixed list of things you’re trying to communicate. In one game, I was trying to simply tell the team that the Blue guy was the character in the apartment, but all of the cards had animals on them (which my brain conveniently ignored) – and they were convinced that I was trying to also say that Blue was a pet lover… which sadly was not the case.

After 4 Days, the game is resolved. Again, remember that the game is different whether Murder is on the solution board or not…Due to the cards, we found the game has the right amount of challenge for us – as long as we include at least 2 of the more complex motive tiles (the tiles which require you to identify another character as the target of the action). This requires the team to identify a few more pieces of information; it also makes it harder to interpret which answers are correct or not at the end of each round (since you have to have both pieces of information correct for that tile to be considered correct). After all eight cards are on the board, the players must try to guess the four neighbors’ identities and roles. The game master then says how many of the eight guesses are right, but not which ones. If at any point the players get all eight correct, everybody wins. If there’s a murder, however, the game master wants to mislead the players on just that one topic, winning by themselves if the players guess six or seven things correctly but don’t guess who committed the murder. If the players get all eight things right including the murder, they win and the game master loses. The one thing that I haven’t been too keen about is the occasional semi-cooperative game. Whenever the Murder tile is drawn, the game switches modes; and only one player is aware of the change! Our group has really liked the cooperative puzzle solving of the majority of the games, and the spectre of this possibility makes you look at all of the cards even closer; which can be frustrating (to both sides) as sometimes the cards just don’t show the things that you want – or maybe they show too much. For me, I’d like the Director to maybe have a bit more control over the cards for the semi-coop version to work well. Our group has actually toyed with the idea of just pulling the Murder tile out of the possibilities – but we haven’t done this quite yet. Earlier in this review though, you might have noticed the word ‘murder’, and if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that murder plays a big part. In the game adaptation the Watchers hand the Director 12 trait tiles and a murder tile. The tiles are shuffled and four of them are assigned – in secret, behind a screen – to each of the four apartments. You might think a 1-in-13 chance is low when it comes to drawing the murder tile, but the maths is more like 4-in-13, or closer to 1-in-3, so it happens quite often.

Thus far, we have only played in larger groups (4-5 players) – though I get the sense that the game would work great with just 2 people too. Sure, you wouldn’t have as many eyes to see things and to bounce ideas off of – but I think it would still work great.To put a finer point on this concept: each window will have two “aspects” that need to be identified. The first is what person or duo is in that apartment and the second is a general description of what those people might be up to. So, for instance, if the Director knows that the “Song Writer” character from the movie is in apartment A and that he is heartbroken, he or she might play cards matching the color associated with the Song Writer and, perhaps, a window card that shows a dying rose to signify heartbrokenness. After the Director has laid out all the clues for the day, the Watchers can discuss the information and then make their guesses. The Director will then silently tell them how close they got (scoring them out of eight points) and move on to the next day. If the Watchers ever get to seven or eight correct guesses, then everyone wins and everyone is happy.