Escape Plan: Grabbing the loot and running

This review of Escape Plan was featured on Episode 59 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Monopoly Deal, Village, Ticket to Ride: New York and Piepmatz.

We’ve all watched countless heist films. A group of skilled individuals lay out a plan, execute said plan and grab the loot. And then what’s the saying? The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Well, then shoot, Plan B. Hide the loot and lay low – for now.

But now the time is up, and we’ve all got to grab our hidden loot and get out of the city.

Welcome to Escape Plan, the latest game designed from Vital Lacerda, with artwork from Ian O’Toole, published by Eagle-Gryphon Games in 2019. Escape Plan picks up right this moment of the heist narrative: players have three days to evade the cops, get their money and get the heck out of the town.

Lacerda himself has said that he just adores movies and is constantly inspired by them when designing board games. And Escape Plan manages to capture the tenseness of those heist films we’re so familiar with, all the while figuring out the game’s puzzly inteconnectivity that is a signature of Lacerda’s board games.

Each day has six phases: players get their income, the police start to close the exits, the city gets revealed, change turn order, player take their turns, and then prepare for the next day. At the start of the game, you don’t know which one of the three exits is the correct one, and you also don’t get to see where different locations are on the board because the city hasn’t completely been built out yet.

I really enjoy this aspect of the game because it forces you to make decisions with the new information and locations presented to you at the start of each day.

On your turn, you either move or rest. That’s it. Simple, right? But wait, it’s a Lacerda game! When you do a move action, you move 1-3 spaces on the board, try and avoid the police, and visit a location. The most common locations to visit are businesses and safehouses, where you can either collect end-game VPs or up-front cash to help you with your getaway.

Each player receives a different escape plan and a player board, which holds asset and equipment tiles, and contact cards, as well as tracks your income, wounds and executive actions, which are free or paid actions you can take during your turn at any time. The more of certain actions you complete, the more locations on your player board unlock, thus increasing your capacity to hold all these various items.

Your income goes down goes the more locations you visit, as you drop off a cube from your player board to indicate you’ve done an action there.

There are also various locations on the board that assist with movement (the subway stop and helipad), the convenience store (where you can purchase equipment to evade the police or you can raid lockers for money if you have a key), and the clinic and hospital (where you can heal your wounds.) There’s also the chapel where you can decrease your notoriety.

Notoriety is a huge element of the game. Doing just about anything will increase/decrease your notoriety, which re-calculates after every single action round. Notoriety is a track that allows you possibly get more money at the lockers and unlock asset tiles, but it essentially puts a target on our back because when you cross certain thresholds on the notoriety track, all the other players will move the police toward you. And that’s not good in this game.

Also not good is getting caught by the police. When you enter a hex with police on it, nothing happens. But when you leave that hex, you will get wounds.

Players can also employ biker gangs to help evade the police or reduce notoriety as an executive action.

Lastly, if you decide not to move on your turn, you can rest. Resting means you flip back your contact cards and equipment tiles on your board, as well as the First Aid tile. Those items are now all available again. And you can only rest once per day, a total of three times in the entire game. But since you have so few actions, I wouldn’t advise taking this action unless you absolutely have to.

The game does an excellent job of making you feel the weight and pressure of being hunted. There are so few actions in the game, about 12-15 actions total, that every single step has such huge effects on the game.

You’re constantly looking over your shoulder and wondering if another player’s actions will send the police over in your direction.

Do you risk looking for more loot or just run over to the exit as soon as you can? Well, if you delay, once someone exits, each action will cost each player one more dollar, and depending on when you exit, that costs more as well. The first person to exit pays nothing.

If you don’t exit the game, you’re just out of contention from even potentially winning the game. For those who escaped, they count their cash in hand and money they’ve collected from visiting locations, and the person with the most money wins the game.

The game board is double sided and scales differently for player counts. For fans of Kanban, the character of Sandra shows up in Escape Plan and is the automa for the 1-player game. I just realized that Sandra is Lacerda’s wife’s name, and that made me chuckle. Cool beans, I think.

Overall, I just love this game, and probably his lightest to date, but, and that’s a big but, it’s still a Lacerda game, which means it’s still a heavy game and there are a lot of rules to remember. The rulebook is written well and clear and the iconography is great, so it’s just a matter of if you want to invest time in learning this game, which plays in about 60-120 minutes.

The first time I played this game, it was over in about 90 minutes, and it felt really short for one of his games. But the more times I played this game, the richer game play has become. The game shines when people are actively trying to send the police over to your opponent’s neck of the woods when the options are there for placement.

The theme for Escape Plan works well for the mechanisms, and because of that, it seems more intuitive and easier to pick up than his other games. I also love the variability of each game because the board will be built out differently each time.

And that’s Escape Plan! Thanks, Eagle-Gryphon Games, for giving me a copy of this game. This is Meeple Lady for the Five By. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady. Or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!