Escape Plan - An Introduction

 Escape Plan - An Introduction

Game Specs

• Advertised Player Count: 1-5
• *Actual* Player Count: I've only played it with 2, but I think 3-5 is probably your best bet.
• Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
• I think this is fairly accurate as long as at least one player knows what they're doing. The game only has 9-15 rounds, and the actions aren't really that involved, for the most part. There's some light mathing, but it really is fairly well spelled out for folks what actions will get them the most money.
• Age: 12+
• Premise: Players have successfully completed a bank heist, but ever since hiding and investing our ill-gotten gains throughout the city, the police are suddenly hot on our tails. We've got three days to collect as much of the loot as we can before getting out of the city. Whoever has the most money upon escaping the city wins!

Escape Plan is a tile placement game that is primarily about map exploration and item collection. It's another Vital Lacerda title, and for anyone who has been following my blog recently, you'll know that I'm an increasingly big fan of his designs. He's a Portuguese game designer who has quite a list of designs to his names, most of which are Euro-style games. For anyone unfamiliar with that term, it usually comes across as dry or intimidating. They can look complex or abstract. And sometimes they are! But a lot of this stems from the fact that the board games on which most American kids are raised are very luck dependent. Games like Monopoly or Life or Candy Land (which actually isn't a game at all, since once the deck is shuffled, everyone's path is set and no real choices are made short of the two printed shortcuts on the board, which are kind of no-brainers, and thus, the winner of the game is determined at the beginning of it). Euro-style games tend to require more planning and are far less dependent on luck. There may be decks of cards that help determine luck, such as in Escape Plan when players open lockers to see if they've found any worthwhile loot. But overall, planning and strategy will give players the best chance to win and players who are better at the game are more likely to win.

The tile placement in this game is light, as it only happens 3 times throughout the game. But it also has a big impact on the game, as it's through this mechanic that the city is built. There are three places through which to exit the city, but players don't know for certain which exit is the one they can use until the beginning of the third day, when police block two of the three available exits. By visiting different locations, players can collect items, cards, and loot. Each player has an individualized starting card that tells them how much loot they find at each location; most of the loot doesn't mean anything until scoring at the end of the game, but sometimes, players can get cash that they can use in the game to buy gear or use to buy their way out of the city.

The third turn is, by far, the most interesting. When I played with Chad, I chose to get out of the city at the beginning of the turn because I didn't see a way to make *that* much more money before the end of the turn. And if Chad left the city before me, it would cost me $1000 per action I took after he'd left, plus $10,000 just to leave the city. And if I didn't have the money to escape the little police Meeples that were patrolling the city, I just wouldn't escape and Chad would win by default. So I bailed almost immediately, hoping to stick Chad with the bag. Especially because he had two extra action discs. So he'd either be spending a couple more thousand to stay in the city, thus detracting from his bottom line, or he'd be forced to abandon his plan and leave because he didn't have the money to stick around without risking his escape.

Chad is better at math than I am...

...and since that shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me, what happened next also shouldn't surprise anyone. Chad maximized his final round and had just enough cash to escape the city. I think I finished with just a little over $200k and Chad finished with close to $400k. So it wasn't close. But I also like the gambling players need to do on the last turn. See, Chad secured some pretty valuable loot through lockers, which are *kinda* random draws in that we know some lockers have a better chance of being valuable than others, but can still be empty. Depending on how well players plan, we have the opportunity to look at locker tiles and take the most valuable one, or just draw one off the top of the stack and hope it's valuable. So the game rewards good planning and taking risks, but again: it doesn't matter how much loot Chad has at the end of the game if he doesn't have enough liquid cash to get him out of the city once I left first.

Players can also indirectly sabotage each other through locking out locations they may need to visit or by manipulating the police in such a way that other players cannot move freely about the city. The indirectness of that ind of sabotage means that planning is required, but also makes it more satisfying when you can stay one or two steps ahead of your opponent and force them to make bad choices.

Bottom Line: I think it's a fun game and I like how several actions are included in each day, but that the game only lasts three days. There's something about how it's all compiled that lends depth to the game without extending its playtime beyond its welcome. It is, I think, a really great entry point to Lacerda games, as it's on the lighter side of other designs of his that I've played, and it's also not terribly long if at least one person has played the game before and understands how best to teach it. It's not my favorite Lacerda game and I doubt that it ever will be, but I'll also say that it's absolutely worth playing and for people who find this to sort of be at the upper end of complexity in which they're willing to indulge, I think it's a good addition to your game collection!