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The Director wins if the Watchers guess 6 or 7 attributes correctly but do NOT guess the Murder attribute Due to the cards, we found the game has the right amount of challenge for us – as long as we include at least 2 of the more complex motive tiles (the tiles which require you to identify another character as the target of the action). This requires the team to identify a few more pieces of information; it also makes it harder to interpret which answers are correct or not at the end of each round (since you have to have both pieces of information correct for that tile to be considered correct). 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. The players are unaware if a murder happened until they start noticing suspicious signs from their neighbors.
I really like the art direction in the game. It stays true to the feeling and style of the film, and it’s functional at the same time as being really nice. I don’t often make much of a fuss about the art in a game, but in the case of Rear Window the whole game revolves around the artwork, so it matters. We’ve seen a few film tie-ins over the last few years, but the majority of them feel more like a couple of smaller games bolted together. Top Gun with its mixture of a beach volleyball game combined with a dog-fighting one. Jaws with the Island side of the board before the big battle with the angry fish on the rear. Interestingly, both of those games also came from the design studio of Prospero Hall, but Rear Window feels more polished and more refined. It could have been made without the Rear Window name and theming and been just as good. 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. 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!”
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. If you liked Mysterium or similar games ( Shadows: Amsterdam, Obscurio) that involve this sort of guesswork in the guise of deduction, you may love Rear Window. It looks great, which is even important given what a table hog it becomes after all four day boards are in play, and the components are good quality. I just think a deduction game should have more actual deduction, where you understand what’s been eliminated and can use logic to move forward to make better guesses. 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.
One player is the Director, silently playing out clues as to what may, or may not have happened to the other players. 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… The fact that the game master can’t tell players more information about what they got right among each day’s guesses only exacerbates the problem. A raw number from 0 to 8 isn’t helpful—well, 8 would be helpful, but even 7 just tells the players one is wrong without any further indication—and there’s no other mechanism to narrow that down except for the players’ single token that lets them ask whether one specific guess was right. 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! There are additional rules as well including four powers the Watchers can summon during the game (based on the film’s main characters, of course) and an advanced ruleset of character “traits” that require pairing up characters; this person is about to break up with that person and so on. This added wrinkle in the mystery is very difficult to convey but is also a lot of fun to puzzle out.Throughout the rounds, the players communicate openly with each other about what each of the window card clues may mean. Each of the clue cards has multiple “things” in the picture, but not everything in the image may be relevant for the players. The director is only allowed to communicate through the window clues, but can actively listen to the players’ conversation to determine what clues to play during the next round. If the players suspect the director of deceit, they are given a special placard with all of the symbols they may need to point to and communicate silently. That being said, without the potential murder complicating the game, it might actually be far too straightforward as a cooperative deduction game. As such, the gameplay experience lands somewhat in the middle; it’s always fun to play and fairly challenging but can also feel as though the game is cheating players through no fault of their own. Final Thoughts: Whether by complete win, by complete failure, or by sneaky Director-hiding-a-murder win, the game ends at the end of the fourth day. The art is abstract but also much more specific than you might find in something like Mysterium. Game Experience: I’ve not mentioned a few of the other things in the box. For instance, the tiles that the Watchers can use to sneak looks at or replace face-down cards, or get the Director to add a pointer to a card to show which thing to focus on (or not, if you’re feeling particularly devious). There are additional trait tiles which let you add a second person to an apartment along with some kind of relationship between the occupants, just to really spice things up. Rear Window is a very, very good game, and as much as I hate it when Youtube channels make their “this game killed this other game” videos, I can’t see Mysterium getting much more play for me now. Rear Window is like Mysterium 1.5 and it’s great.
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. The art design for the game is really well done, and as I mentioned earlier, I think the cards are the centerpiece to the game. The game is a bit of a table hog once you lay out the Director screen and then make room for the four daily boards – it fit fine on our 10ft table; it might be a stretch on a regular folding card table. The rules are fairly decent, though we think there is a game end condition not met by either win criteria in the semi-coop version. The only other thing, which is unfortunately becoming a Funko trademark, is that there is a FAQ at the end of the rules (which is super nice) that has answers which give things that I feel should be stated in the rules themselves, not in a FAQ which might be ignored on first blush. But, if you read the rules from cover to cover, you should get all the info you need.
Quantum Error review — Admirable failure
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.
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