Nuns on the Run - Tips & Strategies

The first few times playing this game, the biggest complaint in our group was the difficulty of noting where doors were on the board. Due to the paths needing to be marked, there are many spots where doors exist but barely appear in the artwork.

Players tend to inadvertently give away a little information about where they are when they are very intently studying a certain spot on the board to see if a door is there (of course, one could do this to try and confuse the guard player(s)).

In general, doors appear anywhere rooms change, but that knowledge may still not be enough.

I’ve found it helps to use something to mark where doors are. Small glass beads work, or wooden cubes from other games. Keep them off to the side (off the path).

Additionally, while playing the guards, I like to specifically point out each door that blocks my line-of-sight, to help speed up the phase and minimize player’s accidently revealing their position.

So the box says two players can play. Tried it out that way. Found that it is more fun (game actually last a few turns) if the one person who is playing the guards only uses one of them- makes it truly a cat-and-mouse game. Still, would be more fun with more people to make it both challenging and fun for the novices and the guards.

This is not really a tip but more of another suggestion like qbauer’s suggestion of Fury Of Dracula. Scotland Yard is the first Secret Movement game that I heard of and it’s still one of the best in my opinion. I’ve played Fury Of Dracula, and it was fun and had a good production to it but I felt it was a little too tough for the Vampire Hunters to actually kill Dracula. Drac has a lot of minions and in the night time he’s practically impossible to kill and finding him in the daytime is hard to do, and even then he was really hard to kill.

Scotland Yard has the one player as a Secret Agent that the rest of the players are trying to catch. Agent X moves around the board secretly marking his path on a pad of paper and revealing how he traveled(Bus, Taxi, Subway) but not how he traveled. It’s one of the best Secret Movement games I’ve played and one of the best Co-Op games I’ve played, and it’s one of the earliest examples of both, at least as far as I’m aware of.
If you like this game I’m sure you’ll like Scotland Yard too.

The nuns start along a fixed path, so you can know where they will be going. Plan your route about this knowledge to go as fast as you can when you’re away from the nuns, and more carefully when you know the nuns are closer. Sometimes it is best to wait a turn before moving in to let the nuns pass you by.

Like others are saying, Fury of Dracula and Letters from White Chapel are better games. If these themes don’t work, Scotland Yard is the original Hide and Seek game. Garibaldi: La Trafila is also a great family game (uses the same mechanics as White Chapel, but with mellower theme).

I wish I had a tip for making Nuns better, but I don’t.