I want him dead, but more importantly I want to be the one to do it! Aaand that right there is the premise of the game Kill Doctor Lucky. Everyone is in Doctor Lucky’s Estate and, with the exception of Doctor Lucky, everyone wants to kill him, and so will foil anyone else’s attempts to do him in first.
Because it’s from Cheapass Games, the board doesn’t come with character tokens, so you’ll have to provide your own. In the pictures below, the centipede is Doctor Lucky. (Also, this is a three-player minimum game, so please ignore the fact that we only played with two.)
Everyone except Doctor Lucky starts in the Drawing Room, labeled with a 0. The Doctor’s starting position is determined randomly by cards. Gameplay is fairly simple – players may either move one space and, if the room they land in has a name, draw a card, or they may use Move and Room cards to move more than that, move Doctor Lucky, and/or attempt a murder. To try to kill Doctor Lucky, you must be alone with him in a room where nobody else has line of sight. Line of sight is determined by drawing a straight line between the doorways so, for instance, anyone in the Winter Garden can see into the Green House, Piazza, and Carriage House, and the latter three can also see into the Hedge Maze, but because of the way the doors are aligned, the Winter Garden does not have line of sight into the Hedge Maze.
If you successfully isolate Doctor Lucky, you may attempt to kill him. Either you’re using your hands for a value of one, or you can play a weapon for its murder value instead! Some weapons are worth more points in corresponding places. Like the Shoe Horn in the photo below, which would normally have been worth two points, but because the attempt took place in the Lancaster Room, it was worth seven!
At this point, the other players go around in order and choose whether or not to play Failure cards. For an attempt to fail, the collective Failure value must equal or exceed the value of the weapon! With the appropriate amount of players, this also incites a bit of gambling on whether you think the other players can foil it without you having to expend cards. I’ve seen games end quickly because of that gambit.
Provided Doctor Lucky isn’t dead and the game isn’t over, your turn ends with Doctor Lucky moving into the next numbered room along his path. Usually play passes clockwise. However, if Doctor Lucky’s movement brings him into a room with a player in it, play immediately skips to that person’s turn. Depending on where the Doctor starts and what everyone else is doing, it is entirely possible for one player to have taken three turns before another takes their first.
Dorkstock runs a life-size Kill Doctor Lucky at GameholeCon, and – having been suckered into being Doctor Lucky before – my personal interpretation is that the Doctor is so oblivious to everyone trying to kill them because they’re busy reading. I too may not notice a cannon going off near my head if I had my nose buried in a book!
