5 Minute Chase Review
The plan was so cunning it practically had its own elaborate moustache to twirl. The guards would never expect an escape attempt… in the middle of the day! You’d made copies of the cell keys in the workshop, had a length of rope to scale the side into the yard. A quick sprint to the fence boost up over the barbed wire and you’re away! But clearly those pillow bodies you left in the cell haven’t convinced the guards as the alarms go off and the prison bursts into life. The chase is on! Still, it won’t last too long one way or another; about 5 minutes in fact.
Players: 2-4
Time: 5-15 min
Ages: 8+
Designer: Dave Neale, Antony Proietti
Artist: Paweł Niziołek
Publisher: Board&Dice
5 Minute Chase is the most recent release from Board & Dice (Superhot, Pocket Mars), featuring neither board nor dice. Instead it’s all tiles and tokens as one team runs away as fast as they can, while the other team desperately tries to catch them.
To create this chase, they have come up with a really quite brilliant system. Firstly, its a real time game, which always gets the adrenaline pumping, and secondly both teams are racing across the same map. The runners, fresh from their jailbreak, are creating the map, laying down tiles so that all the roads line up. Which sounds like the easiest thing in the world! Except trying to find the right road at the right time amongst all your tiles at speed is crippling. The insane planners of this city only had to go build roads going off in all kinds of zig-zagging directions.
Meanwhile, the police are hot on their tail! They are playing a completely different game, but at the same time and along the route the runners are laying out. On each tile, in order, the police team have to place a symbol token. The correct symbol corresponds to the group of bystanders (on the tile) who have the most faces pointing in the direction the runners went next. This is the beautiful moment where the police rush into the square, yell “Which way did they go!?” and a nearby dog barks in reply.
This core of 5 Minute Chase is brilliant. It’s a real time game whose intensity is set, not by some external audio track, but by the players themselves. As the cops get closer, tension ratchets up. If the runners manage to make some space they’ll have a tendency to relax a bit and slow down… until suddenly the sirens are one street over again! The puzzle that each team is solving is theoretically so simple but under pressure becomes ridiculously difficult, so that both players will be feeling their brains gumming up where you expect to be running smooth and that kind of experience just leads to laughs! Add to that the speed of the game (5 minutes is pretty dead on for a single round) and you’ll be having riotous fun whether you win or lose.
Speaking of winning, the runners are trying to get back to their hideout but some fool left the keys, loot and other essential paraphernalia on roundabouts surrounded by police cars – whoops. You have to visit these spots before you can lay the hideout and win. But how does a con in bright prisoner uniform get through a police roadblock? Well, fortunately the local PD are kind of hopeless and have a habit of parking amongst large bushes you can use to sneak past. To run through a road with police cars on it, you just need to match up that exit with a corresponding set of bushes on the next tile. You’ll see A LOT of police cars!
Meanwhile the chasers want to get a token on to every tile in the route. They can bring the Chase to an end by getting the last token down on the most recent tile played before the runner can get a new tile out. There is of course a twist here. The token played has to point back in the direction the crooks came from – imagine the police sweeping in to surround them! And this has the excellent effect of completely throwing the cops off if the runners manage to play a tile first! Suddenly they have to start that tile’s puzzle again! That’s definitely going to elicit a scream of frustration!
5 Minute Chase is hugely entertaining. Its smart design results in something easy to pick up and play, hilariously intense and, thematically, works wonderfully. You feel like you’re in a chase. Either desperately trying to run away, or rushing to figure out where they went next. The usual caveats about the stress of real time games applies here. The intensity and the repetitive nature of the puzzle means you won’t be playing this all evening, but the ease of play and the sheer entertainment value means you might well be playing it week after week.
Rating: Catch Me If You Can
My copy of 5 Minute Chase was provided for review by Board & Dice.
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