Burke's Law

Burke's Law game by Transogram from 1963. Based on the hit ABC show starring Gene Barry.

The board shows the outline of two large houses - a country house and a city house. Inside each house are squares that are the possible rooms where the murder could have occurred.

There are three possible murder weapons - gun, knife or poison, and four tokens for each type.

There are 12 murder victims tokens - male or female under blankets that were each one of six different colors. The feet sticking out from under the blanket indicate the gender - small feet in little black heels for the females; large black dress shoes for the males.

There were 12 murderer tokens - people of different dress and hair colors - 6 possible clothing colors, 6 possible hair colors, two genders.

There were 7 types of cards with 6 in each - hair color, clothing color, gender, murder weapon, victim gender, victim blanket color, and location (country or city).

As players take turns, the murder rooms will gradually become populated with murders, victims and weapons - one of each in each room, and the players hands will gradually get one of each card type. The goal is to get the cards in your hand to exactly match one of the murder rooms. The first person to do so wins.

When you roll the number for a card type you already have in your hand, you get to pick up all the cards of that type still in the pile, look at all of them, and exchange any one of them for the one in your hand, if you want to do so.