Manhunt - The Electric Computer Detective Game

In Manhunt the players are police detectives attempting to determine who committed a crime. To do this, they must travel around the board to collect clues about the criminal. They then feed these clues into the crime computer in order to narrow down the list of suspects. The first player to correctly identify the culprit is the winner.

At the start of the game, the players decide which type of crime they will investigate; either murder, robbery or swindle. They then select a "Scanner Card" from the list and place it into the "Clue Scanner". The card and scanner will be used to reveal the specific clues pertaining to the crime.

Movement around the board is performed using the "crime computer". A lever on the computer is held down causing dials to spin. When the lever is released, the dials stop. The dial is now pointing to the number of spaces the detective is allowed to move.

Detectives must first move to the "Scene of the Crime" and thereafter may move to either the "Crime Lab", the "Stake Out" or interview a "Witness". When they do so, they take the "Probe" and insert it into the corresponding row on the Crime Scanner.

There are four holes in each row. Under one of the holes is a corresponding hole in the Scanner Card. The Probe will show nothing in the hole corresponding to the one in the Card and a red dot in the other three holes.

The player then looks up the result of the readout in the "Detective Handbook". For example, the first Scene of the Crime row for Robbery corresponds to "Bank Robbery", "Jewel Theft", "Safe Cracked" and "Burglary". If the third hole in the scanner showed nothing on the probe then the player knows the Robbery was a Safe Crack.

As the player visits each of the eight locations on the board (two for each of the locations) they gain additional information about the crime. They can then look up the suspect profiles in the Detective Handbook to use the information to narrow down the list of possible culprits. To continue the example above, for Robbery the suspect "Ida Hoe" is a Bank Robber, Jewel Thief and Safe Cracker but "Luke Sharp" is a Bank Robber, Jewel Thief and Burglar. Since this robbery is a safe crack, Luke Sharp can be eliminated as a suspect.

When a player thinks they have determined who the culprit is they turn the Scanner Card over and read the correct suspect's name off the back of the card. If they are correct they are the winner. If they are incorrect they are eliminated from the game and play continues until the culprit is determined.

Manhunt is a very interesting game. It is a logic problem, though a fairly simple one as the answer will always be revealed through a process of elimination. The mechanics of the game, with the Crime Computer, Clue Scanner and Probe, Clue Cards, Readout Books and Detective Handbooks is actually more complex than the game itself. The use of the Crime Computer to determine movement is interesting but the results are fairly easy to influence by flipping the activation switch correctly.

Still, the game has a very interesting flavor and the steps the players have to go through actually correspond to those that a detective investigating a real crime would perform. While too easy for many people it would be quite good for younger players.

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