Games and AI Group

The game of Scotland Yard™ is a multi-player pursuit-evasion hide-and-seek game. It was introduced in 1983. The game was developed by Manfred Burggraf, Dorothy Garrels, Wolf Hörmann, Fritz Ifland, Werner Scheerer, and Werner Schlegel. The original version was published by Ravensburger, but the game was also distributed for the English-language market by Milton Bradley.

Scotland Yard is played by six players: five seekers, called detectives, and one hider, called Mister X. The game is played on a graph consisting of numbered vertices from 1 to 199. The vertices are connected by four different types of edges representing different transportation types: taxi, bus, underground, and boat. Each player occupies one vertex and a vertex can hold at most one player. The vertex currently occupied by a player is called the location of that player.

The goal for the detectives is to capture Mister X by moving to the vertex occupied by him. The goal for Mister X is to avoid being captured until no detective can perform a move anymore.

Key Publication:

• Nijssen, J.A.M. and Winands, M.H.M. (2012). Monte-Carlo Tree Search for the Hide-and-Seek Game Scotland Yard. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 282-294. © IEEE