Channel your inner director or nosy neighbor this week as we take a look at Rear Window from Funko Games. Adapted from the Hitchcock film of the same name, Rear Window allows one player to sit in the director’s chair while the remaining players work to deduce what’s going on in the apartment building across the street. Peek into the secret lives of your neighbors and try to suss out whether or not a murder has been committed.
The objective of Rear Window is for players to work together to determine who lives in each of the 4 apartment buildings across the way, who those people are and how they relate to one another, and whether or not one of their neighbors have committed a murder. Based on the selected tiles, the director builds a story, one window at a time, to help the other players piece together the clues — and perhaps to hide a murder in the building. At the end of the 4th day (round), players need to correctly guess all 4 of the building’s inhabitants and their 4 total attributes to win.
Rear Window is for 3 to 5 players ages 13+. The game definitely skews older, in part because there is a lot of ambiguity, interpretation, and deduction required, which can overwhelm younger or inexperienced players. Average sessions last around 40 minutes. Included in the box are the Director Screen, the Watcher Screen, 4 Day Boards, a Solution Board, 4 Watcher Placards, 70 Window Cards, 102 Tiles, 45 Tokens, the Trunk Box, 4 Wooden Cubes, and the Instructions.
To begin, players select a group of characters and attributes and give them to the director. The director then builds the Solution Board using some of those selections. The remaining unused selections go into the Trunk, taking them out of the game.The director then uses the Window Cads to try and help the watchers deduce who lives in each apartment and their attributes and/or connection to the other apartment dwellers. If the director picks the Murder tile, then the director’s objective changes from helping the watchers make 8 correct guesses to hiding the murder from them.
Our testers were split in their reaction to Rear Window. I found the game frustrating because of the amount of ambiguity between the various Window cards. Is the director playing a specific card because of the character featured? One of the many details on the card itself? Am I supposed to be clued into the baseball bat or the piano in this card? Additionally, not knowing whether the director is along for the entire 8 guesses or trying to hide the murder behind one of those guesses makes the game too wide open for me to fully enjoy, in part because I don’t know what the winning conditions are — 6 or 7 correct answers if there was a murder or all 8 correct answers if there was not a murder, which isn’t revealed until the end of the game.
However, a couple of our testers absolutely love the interpretive nature of the game and continue to bring out Rear Window at every opportunity. They find it fun and fascinating to try and figure out what’s going on in each apartment with a director who may or may not be on your side and a bunch of Window cards with a ton of details on each and trying to figure out which detail the director is keyed in on.
If you’re looking for less linear gameplay and more open-ended play, then Rear Window is right up your alley!
Pick up your copy of Rear Window online with an MSRP of $34.99. At the time this review was typed, Amazon was selling Rear Window for $29.99.
Disclaimer: A copy of Rear Window was provided for review purposes. All opinions are our own. Purchasing through the links above helps support Pop Goes the Culture.
