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Bullet, The Italian Job, The Fast and the Furious…what do they all have in common? At some point in the movie there is an action-packed car chase. Ever wondered what it would be like to be in the driver’s seat of a high octane fuelled car chase, police breathing down your neck, action packed stunts, handbrake turns, jumping over improvised ramps, and driving on two wheels? Well now you can in Getaway Driver.
Getaway driver is a two-player fast, fun car chase where one player is the daredevil motorist trying to escape the city by performing crazy stunts and the other player is the police deploying road blocks, dispatching extra police cars, motorcycles, armoured cars and police helicopters all in attempt to capture the other player.
Getaway Driver Gameplay
Getaway driver is a super fun, easy to play, fast game for two players, set in an asymmetric city that is built as the game progresses. Each turn the police secretly build the city using a selection of downtown, urban and rural tiles. The Driver then performs their turn followed by the police. During the driver's turn they can play a stunt card, reclaim a stunt card, reveal city tiles and move. On the police’s turn they move their police vehicles, purchase upgrades and call for reinforcements.
The Police are moving their vehicles to corner and capture the Driver, or herd them in to an area with more police vehicles or obstacles. The Driver uses stunt cards to avoid the cops, obstacles on the city tiles and collect stash along the way.
The Police win the game if they manage to increase their pursuit meter to max and the Driver wins if the last city is placed before this happens. One of the interesting features is that the game designers are calling Getaway Driver as a “real space” game. So as the city grows things like table edges, glasses or any other physical boundary on the table are not to be re-positioned and are reflected in the game as natural city limitations. The table edge becomes a cliff and tiles can’t be positioned off the edge of the cliff. A glass becomes a sky scraper and must be manoeuvred around.
Initial Thoughts
Getaway driver looks like a super fun two-player game reminiscent of any action movie car chase. The stunts are crazy and add some twists to the gameplay and make for great storytelling. The police also have some cool equipment and vehicles available to them. The city is never going to be the same from game to game due to the variety of tiles available. I like that the city is built as you play the game making for quick on the spot decisions on how best to escape the cops or capture the Driver.
The “real space” game aspect described above can make for some interesting city layouts. I can see people actively scattering items on the table as city obstacles to mix up the gameplay. All in all I think this is going to be a fun game that can be taught in minutes, with minimal set-up. I can’t wait to be driving in to oncoming traffic, jumping over an improvised ramp and then performing a hand brake turn to escape the pesky cops. Equally appealing is the thought of deploying my armoured police cars, helicopter and road blocks to capture that villainous criminal mastermind and slapping them in hand cuffs.
Getaway Driver was funded on Kickstarter in July 2018 and is due to be delivered in March 2019. I might need to sit and watch a couple of action moves in preparation for receiving the game to fine tune my tactics. What is the best way to avoid a road block or an overturned fruit cart?