Seneca Student Paper - Rob Good – June 15, 2006
For four hours of his life Andrew Alexander was a fugitive on the loose. He enjoyed every minute of it.
Alexander was a player in Joel Friesen’s Live Action Scotland Yard (LASY), an interactive game based on the board game Scotland Yard. Every summer players get together and venture off into downtown Toronto, running away and chasing each other amidst commuters and tourists. Though many elements of the game remain the same, one large difference is obvious: this game takes place on the streets of Toronto, not London.
“The board game is huge,” Friesen said. “It takes over all of London. I couldn’t make a board game that had the same scale, so I had to use restrictions.”
The game takes place between Pape Avenue and Bathurst Street, never venturing north of Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue. The object of the game is quite simple: catch Mr. X.
Detectives, using their dispatchers as guidance, scour the downtown core in search of a bright yellow T-shirt, labeled with a large X.
Every time Mr. X moves, he calls into his dispatcher, who in turn lets the detectives’ dispatchers know what his next three modes of transportation will be. Each move by Mr. X consists of any combination of subway, streetcar or bus. The detectives don’t know where Mr. X is, only which modes of transportation he uses.
Though it sounds easy, when Alexander wears the bright yellow T-shirt, he knows how to confuse his hunters.
“If you go on the subway, you cover a lot of ground. But it’s easy to be caught because you can only go certain directions,” he said. “So I would use all three turns on a streetcar. I ended up doubling back, going in a circle. They couldn’t find me.”
Amy Cunningham knows all too well the frustration of finding Mr. X. When she was a detective, she let her one opportunity to apprehend the man in the yellow T-shirt slip through her fingers.
“I saw Mr. X getting off of the streetcar,” she said. “The rule is, once he got to the next scheduled stop, he’d have to at least put one foot down on the ground. But there were a throng of people getting on and off the streetcar, so after he put his foot down he simply got back on.”
As a detective, one rule players must follow is you can’t get on the same vehicle as Mr. X. Cunningham had to resort to other measures.
“I actually started running beside the streetcar. I ran for quite a while - it was going really slowly. The driver kept stopping for me, but I couldn’t get on.”
Eventually she hopped in a cab, swallowing the $5.
“The streetcar turned into a subway station, and the stairs leading to the subway were right there. I missed him by a hair. That was my only brush with Mr. X.”
The idea of LASSY came to Friesen when he moved to Toronto in April of 2004 and, after seeing a map of the TTC’s routes, realized the city was enough of a grid to make a game like this work. He has always been an avid fan of board games and, as he’s well-versed in reading maps (his father worked with them, so he has been around them all his life), the idea for the game came quite easily to him.
He’s quick to point out, however, that not all cities may be equipped to host a game like LASSY.
“Unfortunately for a lot of people, their cities are laid out badly for this type of game,” he said. “Toronto’s perfect. It’s a giant grid, and it has all three major transportation systems.”
As for the fugitive Alexander, he eventually met his match.
“I was caught by chance. I got lost from one of the streetcars when a guy tackled me from behind.”
