Game report from the "New Nimrods of London"

Last night I rediscovered the simple joys of the boardgame - learning new rules, drinking booze, arguing and cheating! I achieved all of these when I played "Escape from Colditz" for the first time with James, Mark, Martha, Rachel and Richard (who played the part of the Germans). The game immediately became more interesting when Richard announced that we were allowed to cheat - with the proviso that if we got caught, we'd be thrown into the cooler! Before he managed to finish his sentence I had "acquired" six more opportunity cards which got quickly shoved behind the stereo. Unfortunately I got caught out three times in the middle of various nefarious acts - passing cards, stuffing them in Pringles tubes and liaising with Mark about the next escape. Martha was even more blatant - she was busily walking straight out of a tunnel, without any of the correct cards, before Richard apprehended her. Apparently this kind of cheating was not allowed! The girls - being in their very nature irrational - immediately started a heated argument about why we were allowed secretly trade cards but they weren't allowed to just walk out of the place. Suffice to say, they didn't play for the duration. But the remaining men soldiered on! James made two daring, but unsuccessful snap escapes - one man shot, one man caught at the wire. Mark and I planned to tunnel out of the chapel in a combined Dutch-Polish attempt. We had four men in the tunnel when suddenly our time ran out and the "Do or Die" rule came into play. Like a sort of "POW sudden death", each player has a limited number of dice roles to get their men out. The tunnel escape got into full swing as a result, but only one of Mark's escapers made it. I also went for a snap escape out of a 30ft window, but I got caught miles from my goal. The Swiss border was but a distant dream! It's a great game that captures the spirit of the escapes very well, although some extra cards relating to things like weather, time of day and so on would not go amiss. That said, I would definitely like to devote a day to play it through to the bitter end - the theatre tunnel beckons!

(from Gavin)