FUNKO GAMES Alfred Hitchcock`s Rear Window Board Game - Mysterious Cooperative Decision Making Game Features Hollywood Legends Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart

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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. 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.

Rear Window—like nearly all of Prospero Hall’s games—is an above-average game with fantastic artwork and exceptional theme integration. It’s also probably not the most exciting (semi-) cooperative game on the market, nor is it the tensest pure deduction game you can play. Ultimately, that’s what the designers were definitely going for and adding in the “murder” twist was a clear attempt to differentiate this design from what others have done. For my money, the advanced and interacting character traits are the more appealing way to play the game, and simply removing the possibility of a murder to make the game purely cooperative is much more fun.In addition to this the design and illustrations of the board, cards and components are beautiful and capture the 1950s theme brilliantly!

If and when a murder tile comes into play, the game is no longer cooperative. It’s now competitive. If the Watchers guess at least seven of the eight pieces of information, and guess where the murder happened, they win. For the Director to win when someone’s been offed, they have to make sure the Watchers guess at least six pieces of information and have them not guess where the murder happened. It’s a fine tightrope to tread. These tiles are used by the watchers to get clues about clues. So we’ve played the game a few times, and we’ve had a pretty fun time with it. I have personally enjoyed being a Watcher more than being the Director; but I think this is because I’m not very good at sitting around not saying things!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. Yes, the game also involves secret murdering just like in the movie, although that’s where things get a little confusing. You see, the Director knows there’s been a murder from the start of the game, but for some reason still needs the Watchers to get most of the information correct except the whole murder part. So, if there was a murder, the game is now only semi-cooperative, but only one person knows it’s semi-cooperative. In this case, the Watchers need to sniff out the murder and where it happened just like all the other information, while the Director needs the Watchers to get everything right except the murder. Make sense? No? Well, we’re moving on anyway. Funko Games has turned a number of film and TV properties into board games, including the Ted Lasso party game (light, and not that thematic, but it’s fun for a timed color-matching game) and the Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar cooperative legacy game. They also brought Rear Window to the tabletop, using images of the actors from the film while trying to recreate the feel of the film’s core mystery—was there a murder, and if so, who did it—but the core mechanic of the game involves way too much wild guessing rather than relying on logic or deduction to get to the solution. 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. 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…

Jeff phones Doyle and leaves an urgent message while Stella goes to bail Lisa out of jail. When his phone rings, Jeff assumes it is Doyle, and blurts out that the suspect has left. When no one answers, he realizes that it was Thorwald calling. Thorwald enters Jeff’s dark apartment and Jeff sets off a series of camera flashbulbs to temporarily blind him. Thorwald pushes Jeff out the window and Jeff, hanging on, yells for help. Police enter the apartment, Jeff falls, and officers on the ground break his fall. Thorwald confesses to the police that he murdered his wife. The Watchers win if they have 7 or 8 attributes correct and MUST have correctly guessed the Murder attribute The other big departure from Mysterium is the art direction for the cards. Mysterium is like Dixit, in that the cards are often surreal, with colours and images which don’t normally belong together. In Rear Window, the cards all feature people and/or places from each apartment. You’ll see very specific people on the cards, matching the people you’re trying to guess. On the one hand, this is great. If you want to tell them Miss Torso is in apartment A, you can just put a card with her in that slot on the board. The difficulty comes when – as Director – you have a hand of cards which don’t feature the people you want to point to. What then? These boards are where the Watchers make deductions and guesses. The clues take the form of a spread of cards on the board, representing the apartment windows that Stewart’s L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries peers into through his camera lens. It’s up to the players - replacing Jeffries, Kelly’s Lisa Carol Fremont, Det. Lt. Tom Doyle and Stella McGaffery - to decode the inhabitants’ relationships with each other, symbolised by tiles that feature phrases such as “arguing with”, “looking for romance with” and, of course, “MURDER!”The Director wins if the Watchers guess 6 or 7 attributes correctly but do NOT guess the Murder attribute