Board Game Analysis: Kill Doctor Lucky

For the course in Advanced Game Design, all of the students have been tasked with playing and analysing the systems of board games. In a group of six people, I’ve been analysing the game “Kill Doctor Lucky”. Kill Doctor Lucky is an inversion of the classic game “Clue” where the players are out to kill a man instead of looking for clues to solve who did it. You, and all of the other players, want to kill Doctor Lucky, but you cannot do it whilst anyone else is watching.

 

Core Game System:

Kill Doctor Lucky is a game for three to seven players. The game is played on a board resembling a mansion, with many different rooms and corridors. Each player strives to kill the Doctor without the other players seeing it, or interrupting it. The core of the game is to move through the mansion to get Doctor Lucky into a room together with you where no one else can see you, and using different kinds of modifiers, such as cards and tokens, in order to kill, or prevent another player from killing, the Doctor.

Modifiers

The different kinds of modifiers of the game are four kinds of cards and the spite tokens. The cards consist of Move cards, Room cards, Weapon cards and Failure cards. Each player starts the game with six cards on hand, and gathers more cards during the game. All cards may be played during the players’ turn if possible, except for Failure cards that are played whenever another player attempts to kill Doctor Lucky. Any used card is put in a discard-pile and whenever the card-pile the players pick cards from is emptied, the discard-pile is shuffled and turns into the new card-pile. Failure cards however doesn’t go into the discard-pile, but are discarded entirely from the game whenever they’ve been used, resulting in less and less failure cards in the game to stop any murder attempts.

The Move cards allow the player to either move their own character or Doctor Lucky. On each tur the player whose turn it is may take one step with their character, moving into another room or corridor, without using any cards. In order to move more than one step during ones turn, or to move the Doctor, the player needs to use a Move card. The Move cards have specific numbers mentioned on them representing how many steps you may move your character or Doctor Lucky using the card. By using one or multiple Move cards at once a player may get from one part of the mansion to another in one turn, or move Doctor Lucky into another room or end of the mansion.

The Room cards allow the player to instantly jump to the room mentioned on the card, or to instantly move Doctor Lucky to that location. The Room cards are great tactical cards, allowing the players to plan ahead and move towards certain rooms in order to get there together with the Doctor when no other player can see them. They can also be used to move the Doctor to prevent him from walking into another players’ room.

The Weapon cards contain different kinds of weapons which deal different amounts of damage. Whenever a player ends up in the same room as Doctor Lucky without anyone watching, the player may attempt to kill the Doctor. The player is able to attempt the murder without the use of any weapons, thus dealing only one damage, or by using one of their weapon cards. Some Weapon cards may deal a higher amount of damage in certain rooms. Doctor Lucky has no specific amount of health points and may be killed without weapons as well as with weapons. However, a higher amount of damage dealt by using a weapon improves the players’ chance of actually killing the Doctor, as the other players are trying to prevent the murder in order to kill the Doctor themselves.

The Failure cards are played whenever another player attempts to kill Doctor Lucky. The Failure cards can only be played when another player attempts to murder the Doctor, and aren’t used during the players’ own turn. The Failure cards have certain numbers on them, indicating how much damage they prevent the killer from using. The total amount of failure numbers played must be equal to, or exceed, the damage dealt by the killer in order to prevent the murder. If the Failure cards’ numbers are equal to or more than the damage dealt, the murder attempt fails and Doctor Lucky continues his stroll through the mansion, oblivious of what happened. If however there isn’t enough failure numbers to stop the attempt, Doctor Lucky is killed and the player who killed him wins the game. Whenever a Failure card has been used it is discarded from the game, resulting in less and less Failure cards to stop any murder attempts. A player may choose not to use any Failure cards, or pretend to not have any when another attempts to kill the Doctor in order to make the other players use up their cards so that they won’t be able to stop the player later on. Choosing not to play any Failure cards, however, is a risk as it may result in another player winning if the other players trying to prevent the murder don’t have enough Failure cards on hand.

Whenever a player attempts to kill Doctor Lucky and fails, they are given a Spite Token. The Spite Tokens may be played whenever the player attempts to kill the Doctor, with or without Weapon cards. Each token adds one damage to the total damage of the murder attempt. Players may however choose not to use their Spite Tokens, making many low-damage attempts at killing Doctor Lucky in order to get the other players to use up their Failure cards on hand, and in order to gather more Spite Tokens. Any number of Spite Tokens may be played at once, and a player that has managed to gather many Spite Tokens may well overwhelm the other players by dealing a lot of damage at once.

The Dog

In some versions of the game, Doctor Lucky owns a small dog which follows him around. The dog however moves at a slower pace than the Doctor, making him fall behind, though he always knows where the Doctor is and always chooses the shortest route to get to him. In one of the versions with the dog, the dog is also able to see the players’ characters, preventing them from attempting to kill Doctor Lucky if he is around. The dog may be killed in order to stop him from following the Doctor around, but as with the Doctor he can only be killed if no one else is watching and if the other players’ don’t prevent the attempt with Failure cards. In another version, the dog cannot prevent anyone from killing Doctor Lucky, and cannot be killed, but whenever a player makes a murder attempt and fails, the dog also gets a Spite Token. The players may collect the dogs’ Spite Tokens by entering the same room as the dog and trade their cards on hand for the tokens, one card for one token, thus gaining more Spite Tokens to use in order to kill the Doctor.

 

The Best and most Interesting systems:

The most interesting, and best system of the game is the Line of Sight. Each room in the mansion has a set of permanently open doorways. When a player is standing inside any of the rooms, their Line of Sight will pass through the doorways. If another player can stand in one room and look in a straight line through any number of doorways into your room, the other player can see you. The doorways are aligned in a way that allows the players to see through many rooms in the mansion at the same time, making it more difficult to make any attempts at killing Doctor Lucky, as the other players might see you even though they are in a different part of the mansion. The player often didn’t need to move far in order to destroy for the other players, to make sure that they didn’t get a chance of killing the Doctor. When playing a version of the game that included the dog that also had a Line of Sight, the game became a lot harder, as the dog constantly followed the Doctor around. The players often quickly went after the dog in hopes of killing him to stop him from seeing them with the Doctor.

Another good system in the game was the combination of Move, Room and Weapon cards, as they gave the players more reason to move around in the mansion. The Move and Room cards allowed the player to quickly move from one room to another, or to move Doctor Lucky into specific rooms. This, in combination with the Weapon cards, where some weapons dealt more damage in certain rooms, made the players plan ahead more, hoping to reach certain rooms, and get the Doctor into that same room, where their weapons dealt more damage in order to make it harder for other players to foil their murder attempts.

 

The Not-so-good part of the game:

Camping is when a player is able to stay in one place throughout the entire game, thus “camping” in that room and keeping a constant watch on the other rooms in sight, or staying in one specific, secluded room with low Line of Sight, waiting for the Doctor to arrive in order to kill him. Whilst this might be a good strategy, it made the game less entertaining when players stopped moving and instead camped inside a room or corridor. It was also possible to Farm for cards by staying in specific rooms until the Doctor arrived. Whenever Doctor Lucky entered a room occupied by a player, the turn went to that player. If that player then decided not to try and kill Doctor Lucky, but instead picked a card and moved one step, the player could in some areas move in such a way that the Doctor would keep entering the room said player had just stepped into, making it that players’ turn once more. This way one player could pick many cards in a row by repeating the process, “farming” for cards, which led to one player suddenly holding most of the cards in play.

One of the reasons that players took to camping in rooms was that there were few Move cards in the deck. The lack of Move cards made camping a lot more frequent than what it might have been, had there been more cards allowing the player to take more than one step at a time, and thus moving more quickly through the mansion. As it took long to move away from certain areas in the mansion, it sometimes proved more profitable to stay in the room and wait for the Doctor instead of moving around, as he almost made his way to the player anyway before it was their turn again. This problem might be less frequent with fewer players, as the players would need to move around more in order to keep the others in their Line of Sight to prevent them from killing the Doctor.

 

Who would like to play this game?

This is a family board game for all families. The game is recommended for children of the age ten and older, which seems appropriate as younger children might find the Line of Sight and Spite Token systems, as well as the dog, a bit complicated. It wouldn’t be impossible for younger children to play however together with an adult that could keep track on the Line of Sight, dog and tokens. Even though the game is about killing Doctor Lucky the art of the game and the portrayal of the characters are neither scary nor creepy. The game has a rather friendly art-style with a lot of colour to the board itself, and with characters that have a slightly Disney-villain feeling to them. The failure cards all have short and quirky descriptions on them, explaining how the Doctor escaped, and some of the weapons aren’t things that you would ordinarily think of as weapons. Any player that have played and enjoyed the classic game “Clue” may very well find this game just as enjoyable.

 

Summary:

Kill Doctor Lucky is a family-friendly game about killing a man when no one can see you. Though perhaps not the most well-balanced game, making it easy for players to start camping in rooms or to farm for cards, it is an enjoyable game that requires some thinking and planning ahead. The games’ Line of Sight system is a very interesting part of the game, and requires the players to plan where to go in order to get into a secluded room together with the Doctor to kill him, and the players often try to plan many turns ahead. In order to win the game the players also have to try to make the other players use up their Failure cards, so that they won’t be able to use them when said player attempts to kill the Doctor, but by making the others use up their cards the player also increase the chance of other players winning as another player might take the chance first.

I personally find the game to be very enjoyable, as it reminds me a lot of “Clue” whilst still being its’ own game. I like the way that the Line of Sight system works and the tactical thinking when trying to plan ahead in order to get to the Doctor and kill him first. The game would benefit from having less Failure cards in the deck, and more Move cards, as the game quickly became a bit slow when the players discovered that they could camp in the rooms, and playing with less Failure cars increased the speed and intensity of the game.

 

That’s all for now folks. I wish you all a great weekend!

MPh out.