Stealth - a cop criminal themed strategy board game

How do you determine what house you're hiding in?

I would consider changing the name of the game. It seems the main aspect (from watching the video) is more based on the tactical movement and getting away (as the criminal trio anyways).

I understand not wanting any luck and having the game be purely tactical, but I think dice rolling during the shootouts would add a lot of excitement to the game.

Can a player shoot the other when he has just been knifed? Would be interesting if that player would have to back off to shoot again, as if dodging the knife.

Who generally wins in your playtests? Looks like the cops have an advantage (knowing where all the objectives are) if each set of starting weapons is the same.

Regarding the vacant houses... The way I understood how the rules work, here's a suggestion you can use that removes the need for players to write down their position on a piece of paper.

Whenever the criminal moves to the vacant houses, instead of moving off the board, move to a three-space segment in the lower-left corner of the board. Call this the "hiding track." At the end of every turn, if the criminal wants to continue hiding, simply move them along the hiding track one space until the maximum 3 turns of hiding has been reached.

Since the criminal that's hiding can emerge from any of the buildings, it doesn't matter which house they're hiding in. Writing it down on a piece of paper doesn't seem to make a difference. Additionally, this method will prevent someone from losing track of how many turns remain for them to hide.

If in fact the police can search houses for criminals in hiding (and I didn't pick up on that from the video, honestly), here's what I suggest. Have one token for each house, and when the criminal is moved to the hiding track, the criminal player takes all of these, then places the token of their choosing face-down beneath the criminal pawn. When a police squad member raids a house and it's not the house where the criminal is hiding, the criminal player simply passes the corresponding "wrong house" token to the police player. The criminal player is welcome to show her chosen token to any other criminal players, for the sake of communication to the other members of her team. Once the criminal is out of hiding, return all the unused tokens back to the common area and move the criminal token back to the board at the house where they were hiding.

This would mean that the criminal player needs to choose the hiding house once they move into any vacant house, and there's a chance (however small) for the police to find them by raiding. Tracking it on the board means there will be no mistakes made, and everyone will still know what everyone else is doing, just by glancing at the board (but still not know the hiding criminal's location without performing actions).

Hope this has been a helpful suggestion.

This game is interesting. It's not an intensely serious, gritty cops-versus-robbers game. It seems to me built like an action movie, with a broad, sweeping narrative that stretches over the three different boards. It's cool that you're telling a story with the game, and that each of the different boards - like "chapters" in a story - is distinct in certain ways.

Keep working with this, and I'm sure you're going to have a lot of fun with it. :)