You might initially have guessed that this would be a game where Dr Jekyll is in conflict with his Mr Hyde alter ego. The clue tho' is in the title, this is a game from Mandoo Games where both Jekyll and Hyde and working together to keep one step ahead of Scotland Yard (the police). In fact, this is a fully cooperative two-player trick-taking card game which pits both players against a dummy hand representing the police who are in pursuit.
Designed by Olivier Cipière, Gaetan Beaujannot and Genial, with art by Vincent Dutrait, the game is played using a special deck of 28 cards comprising cards numbered 1-8 in three suits plus four 'potion' cards. In each round, players are dealt 12 cards and, without discussing their hands, they each pass on four cards to create the Scotland Yard hand. It's a trick-taking card game where players must follow the lead suit or play a potion card, tho' they can play any card if they don't have one in the suit that led the trick. The suits are ranked so that the middle ranking suit beats the lowest rank but the highest ranking suit beats both the other two; the rank order is determined by the order in which suits appear, with the first suit to appear becoming the lowest rank. Potion cards trigger effects, including the possibility of rearranging suit rank order, depending on the suit of the next card played. For all tricks, the win goes to the highest card of the highest ranking suit...
Scotland Yard plays blind, so the players can usually expect to win the large majority of tricks, but this is a tricksy game: the players' pawn moves ahead on a track only by the lesser number of tricks taken by one of the two players. In most rounds the Scotland Yard pawn is moved forward a space for every 1, 2 or 3 in tricks taken by one of the players.
The game is played as a campaign over 10 'Chapters', with the first four designed to help players learn the game. Each Chapter advances the story and introduces a small rule variant. For each Chapter it can make a difference who is playing that round as Jekyll and who as Hyde, and which is the player that leads the first trick.
There's been a recent explosion in novel trick-taking card games, but Jekyll & Hyde vs Scotland Yard stands out among them because of the cooperative play, the fluid suit ranking and the incremental rule tweaks. There's a scoring system that encourages players to replay the game to try to beat their previous score but we've enjoyed our plays for the excitement of the game itself and the puzzle element involved in finessing your tricks so that you continue to evade police pursuit.