At the moses Verlag In recent years, exciting board games have been released time and again. These include dice games, such as the recently reviewed sugar cubes, quiz games and, for some time now, new crime games. With The perfect plan Another crime game for 2-6 people has now been released. Instead of solving a case or escaping as usual, this time it goes in the other direction. The goal is to break into a museum and steal a painting. So this time you are not playing the good guys.
The perfect plan is for me the first crime game from moses Verlag, albeit small player, certainly not the last! What I like about the publisher is that the smaller dice games, like Rock the buck, Skull and Beam me off! in small drawer boxes. This makes handling a lot easier. I also like the packaging of this game. You open it up and find a drawer in which some of the game material is stored. The game is mainly played with 47 cards and forty 50€ notes. You also get a newspaper, two museum maps and a police marker.
In order to give away as little of the story as possible, I will keep the story part of the game as short as possible. You belong to a criminal gang and have to set up the lotus flower pond for your boss. You don't have to do this yourself, but it is enough if you have a plan at the end of the game how the break-in is supposed to go, that means you have to know
- How to get into the building
- On which day the break-in is to take place
- Where the painting is located
- How to leave the building
It may already be clear to you now, but we only realized it while playing. While the usual escape/crime games are always about finding a solution and moving through the adventure, here you are much more free. There is no feedback in the game as to whether you are on the right track or not. As long as you don't fail along the way, you decide for yourself when you think you have found the right answers to the 4 questions. That's actually very nice, but it also always puts you at a certain risk of ending the game with the wrong answers.
You begin planning your break-in by reading out the first card. Here you will receive information about the current situation and four options for action that you can buy. You will therefore always have to give up some of your €2.000 when you decide on an action. According to the instructions, you can buy around 2/3 of the actions. This means you are limited, which makes the game exciting, because otherwise you could simply decide on all options before you make the final plan. So always weigh up which action might give you an advantage and which might not. During the game, the options and the prices of the respective options vary. It is therefore also possible that you will run into a narrative dead end or have received all the information from one person.
Oh yes, there is another restriction, because there are also actions that make you suspicious and make the police move up the track. There are 6 spaces in the box. As soon as the police reach the last space, your break-in has failed. So be careful which actions might be too suspicious. You can also decide on the remaining options on a card later, as long as you can pay the costs.
These restrictions obviously increase the level of difficulty - the game is advertised as medium difficulty - but they increase the atmosphere immensely. Although the game uses so little game material, you can immerse yourself in the story very well, which is also due to the fact that you have the newspaper and the museum plans as materials that you can look at. This almost analogue point & click mechanism immerses you in the world and explores it little by little. Since you can always decide for yourself which path you want to take next, the game is also very different from the otherwise mostly linear narrative structures.
Last but not least, I would like to emphasize that all the game material remains intact. You cannot play it again yourself, because at the end you know the solution, but you can easily give it away, swap it or sell it on.
So much for the very good aspects of the game, but there are also two minor weaknesses. As nice as the freedom of play is and as much as I would like to emphasize it, it has a bad taste in the mouth that you never know during the game whether you are drawing the right conclusions from the information. As a result, this can mean that you end the game and then lose. After all, you only have one attempt, after which you know the solution. We had a lot of fun during our round and were immersed in the story. At the end we had an idea of how our break-in should go, but we weren't completely sure whether that was the right way.
As soon as you decide to reveal the final plan to the boss, you reveal card 44 and are again presented with the four key questions and four possible answers for each. The fact that there are now possible answers suddenly limits the game somewhat, because now you only have to consider which of the options mentioned makes the most sense - given the knowledge you have gathered. That was also crucial for us, as we then saw our choice confirmed. I'm a little unsure whether it would make sense to name these options from the start. Not really, because that takes away a lot of the story from the game and limits you. But it would be nice if you had known in advance that you would have a choice afterwards. That way it's enough if you have an idea, but maybe haven't formulated it perfectly.
A suitable example, and I'm mentioning it now because it's clear if you read the instructions and the questions carefully. You only have to say which day the break-in takes place, not when exactly on which specific day. We had also thought of a specific time. But that was our fault, because the task was clear, but the example can still illustrate what a difference it makes to have to give a free answer and choose between four options. In the end, you don't need the detailed answers that you may have thought at the beginning.
Another interesting point is money. We really liked this limitation and it makes sense in terms of gameplay that we buy information and access. But at the beginning we felt like we had a lot of money (and we didn't spend it too much, after all we knew the limitation) and in the end we ran out of money. So we couldn't buy any more information. We did have some good ideas, but as I said, we were never sure that we really had the right answers.
In the end, our break-in was successful and we were all happy with the game. But I can also understand anyone who plays the game, maybe draws the wrong conclusions somewhere and ends up giving the wrong answer or loses during the game because the police catch you. Then you've played the game, invested time, but it's just over. There are no second chances because you've already gathered knowledge. It's probably like in real life, with some things you only get one try and as Yoda once said "Do it or don't do it. There is no trying". Of course, this is just meant in a playful way, you're not supposed to break into anything.
Fun fact: When I was researching the game, I couldn't find a painting by Monet called Lotus Pond. Compared to the picture on the packaging, I assume that it could mean "Water Lily Pond and Japanese Bridge". There is certainly a certain similarity. A slightly different title was probably chosen to give the game a fictional feel.
# | Preview | Product | Rating | Price | |
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1 | Südzucker sugar cubes, pack of 10 (10x 500 g) * | 19,89 EUR | |||
2 | Nordzucker - Sweet-Family sugar cubes - 7x1000g * | 19,31 EUR | |||
3 | Nordzucker Sweet Family sugar cubes 6-pack (6x1kg) + usy... * | 14,81 EUR | |||
4 | usy Bundle for Nordzucker Sweet Family sugar cubes (1kg) + usy... * | ||||
5 | Südzucker sugar sticks, 50 sticks, 250g * | 2,49 EUR |
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