221B Baker Street: The Master Detective Game

By Steve Hatherley

221B Baker Street is a classic deduction board game for 2 to 6 players, aged 10 and up. It challenges players to race across Victorian London, gather clues from 14 locations, and solve one of 75 unique criminal mysteries.

I was visiting family recently and discovered they had a copy of this classic board game (first published in 1975 – over 50 years ago!). As I hadn’t played it before, I had to give it a try…

OVerview

Each player takes the role of Sherlock Holmes and they race across London to be the first to solve a gruesome crime. Each game starts with a murder to solve, complete with a short backstory and hints on where to start looking.

To solve a case, a player needs to be able to answer the questions that Scotland Yard needs answered. Typically these are to identify the murderer, the murder weapon and the murderer’s motive. They can vary from case to case, however.

Cases are solved by visiting locations around the board (such as the bank, the theatre, a hotel and so on), and looking up clues in a master clue book. Although there is usually a clue at each location, sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason as to why the clue is at that particular location.

Anyway, when a player knows enough to answer the questions posed by the mystery, they race back to 221B Baker Street and find out if they are correct.

Other rules

There are other rules – such as being able to lock a location so that others can’t visit it (but players can use a key to bypass that), but I didn’t find they had a huge impact on play.

Our games

I played twice, and both games were quite close, with at least two players having solved the mystery and it was a race back to Baker Street.

Both were three-player games, and each took less than an hour to play. I am sure more players would take longer (six players is probably very frustrating).

Issues

I had a couple of issues with the game – primarily movement, the difficulty of cases and hogging the clue book.

Movement: The biggest frustration we had with 221B Baker Street is the movement rules – which are basically roll a die and move forward that number of squares. Given that the game happens mainly when you are getting clues, it can be annoying to be held up by a series of low die rolls.

(Boardgamegeek has ideas for solving this.)

Difficulty of cases: We started with one of the early cases and found it fairly unsatisfactory, as the clues were very basic. So for our second game, we skipped forward to case 15, which was much more complex, with more subtle clues that required more thought. It wasn’t so easy to solve and was much more satisfying as a result - I didn’t get the whole solution completely right.

Hogging the clue book: We found sharing a single clue book mildly irritating, as quite often we were all in locations and couldn’t do anything until the player ahead of us had finished writing the clue down. A second clue book would have made a huge difference.

Overall

Overall, 221B Baker Street is an okay game. It’s a good family game, but I’ve played better board games, and it shows its age.

To its credit, 75 cases give the game a lot of replayability – that’s a lot of plays!

I’m Steve Hatherley, an experienced designer of interactive murder mystery games, creating and hosting them since the 1990s. I co-founded Freeform Games and Great Murder Mystery Games to bring this distinctive, character-driven style of game to a wider audience. My work—including Death on the Gambia, Hollywood Lies, and
—has been enjoyed by thousands of players worldwide. I’ve also written a book sharing my approach to creating immersive, freeform mystery experiences.