Scotland Yard

FANCY being a detective? The board game Scotland Yard will provide you with all the thrills of being a real-life detective. You can also get the nerve-racking experience of being a fugitive, with Scotland Yard detectives close on your heels.

The game requires deductive and logical skills and can be played by four to six persons. One person becomes the elusive Mr ‘X’ while the others try to nab him through the maze of Central London.

Each player determines the place from where he/she will begin. The players, including the detectives and Mr X, can move either by taxi, bus or tube. The first person to move is Mr X. He notes down his mode of transport but not his destination in a travel log. The detectives follow one by one, each co-operating with the others so that they can close in on Mr X who reveals his location only at certain points in the game.

The game goes on until one of the detectives catches Mr X by reaching the spot where he is located. But if Mr X manages to remain elusive even after 24 moves, he is declared the winner.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, creator of the first modern English dictionary, hated it when writers borrowed ideas from other people’s books and tried to pass them off as their own.

One day, a young man came to him with a book he had written and requested Johnson to read it and to let him know what he thought of it. Johnson told him he had already read it and said that it was “good in parts” and “quite original in some parts”. The writer was delighted. “Unfortunately,” continued Johnson, “the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.”