Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.
Stealth is a well-worn staple of video games nowadays, whether you’re eagle-diving onto an unsuspected guard’s head in Assassin’s Creed or making a hasty wardrobe change in Hitman. While at a glance the genre may not be as obviously popular or prolific over on the tabletop – nobody’s pulling off silenced headshots in Monopoly, after all – stealth board games have existed in cardboard for almost as long as they have on TV screens.
One of the earliest stealth board games was Scotland Yard, released in 1983 – just two years after Sega arcade game 005 pioneered the genre for video games (or four after stealthy shoplifting game Manbiki Shounen released on PC in Japan, depending on who you ask). Scotland Yard introduced the idea of hidden movement gameplay, with one player controlling invisible criminal Mr. X as they led the police on a goose-chase around London. Instead of a pawn or token on the board, Mr. X tracked their movements on a notepad, with only occasional clues given to the pursuing detectives as they attempted to corner the slippery criminal before they ran out of time.
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