Escape Plan
A handful of high-end thieves try to escape the city with remarkably equivalent piles of money! News at 11!
Escape Plan is a game about, yes, trying to escape a city where the local cops have called in their SWAT teams and the FBI in an attempt to finally take you down. You've set up stashes across the city, and you need to collect as many as possible before the ways out of town are closed off. Mislead the cops to get a free run at your money, push them into the paths of your fellow thieves, and make it out with the most cash! Woo!
There are a few ways to collect your money. Most of the options involve going to the businesses and safehouses where you've put the largest collections of cash and throwing them in your car. Everyone gets a card with a different setup at the start of the game, meaning everyone has different businesses to target if they want to get the largest stashes. Other businesses have ready cash on hand for you; you might only get a few thousand dollars, but you can spend it on items or assistants to help you on your escape quest.
Why you can't just open the briefcases full of cash and spend some of that money goes unexplained.
You also get bonus money for hiring contacts, because... reasons? You can have up to five people on your side, and the bonus goes up to 100k if you fill all the slots. There are stash slots on your player board, which can be used for items that help you fight the cops or lockers from the convenience store that have extra money in them. And those lockers are full of money too, but they have different requirements to get into them—you need almost nothing but a key to open the easiest ones, while you need a bunch of contacts and a certain level of notoriety to open the hardest.
There are other aspects to the game, such as getting wounded and losing money if you're hurt at the end of the game, but those are sidebars to the main point: This game might be too balanced.
The cards each player gets at the start of the game have sums of cash available, from 100k down to 50k, by tens, and three locations where they can get spendable cash. Collecting contacts earns the same money. All the assets you unlock are worth the same money. The lockers, in fact, are extremely weird—why should your contacts and notoriety determine whether you can unlock a different safebox? Shouldn't that be based on the fact you need a different key?—and there's only a 20k difference between the highest level locker and the lowest, but because everything is so equal, that 20k can mean winning or losing.
Difficult but engaging balance involves giving players different ways to maneuver through the game while ending up at around the same spot. Simplistic balance is having them all do basically the same thing and just making the rewards for everything about the same. Escape Plan has the latter.
This type of game can work, but it relies more heavily on the mechanics matching the theme, and unfortunately that breaks down too. If you escape, why does being notorious cost you money? Why does being hurt cost you money? Why do these thieves, who are familiar enough with the businesses and safehouses in the city to invest in them and hide their money there, not know where all the places are until the third day?
It's a set of mechanics that's basically fine, with a rewards system that works well enough, but it's hard to see how this differs from game to game outside of people getting screwed by their two best stashes not becoming available until the last round and being placed where they can only get one or the other, or possibly neither, before they have to run for the hills. Players who are equally good at the game should finish relatively close in score, so you're less likely to have blowout games, and that's a positive. But it would be nice to see a theme that really worked with the mechanics in play.
Score: Five collected stashes out of nine.
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