It’s been a very quiet week from me on here and that’s been down to “manflu” taking me out for most of the week.

Luckily after going through the worst patch Wednesday night and Thursday, things started to improve. The downside of the bad patch being having to miss a first playthrough of Escape from Colditz that Jonathan and I had just got through the post.

So Friday was once again on us, I was feeling much better, not great, but functioning. So FEG@WL was a go.

So with Jonathan putting on his German prison guard hat, Deigo, Les and myself formed an orderly line in the middle of the courtyard to plan our Escape from Colditz.

Opening the box, this game oozes theme, and I just love the production quality of the game. A lovely touch was the separate history booklet that was included. Rightly so much thicker than the rule book.

We played with the new “updated/modified” rules of this 75th Anniversary edition. I will say the rules aren’t that clear. Ideally they should have reworked this making them easier to follow. Looking at them for a first time I found them a little difficult to follow.

All I can say is we had a blast playing this game. It really was a lot of fun. 

Yes there is that competitive element on the prisoner side with the first getting two prisoners out being the winner. But you also have a collaboration side as well.

In the early game I was deliberately taking out guards to give my fellow escapees a window of opportunity to move around without threat. I also hit on the idea of it getting the inner solitary confinement cells full so I’d get placed in the outer one and need less items to escape one let out!

We would be swapping escape equipment making sure Jonathan had no idea of who had what. That way we kept him guessing how we would be trying to get out.

We’d even be giving equipment to aid escape when a run for freedom was being made.

We’d make dummy runs to try and distract Jonathan.

There was one moment on my escape when Jonathan really should have arrested my prisoner instead of blocking me. But I’d tried putting doubt in his head, suggesting he’d missed some-one else’s plan. I couldn’t believe it when he blocked me, Jonathan thought he was blocking my escape. Which he hadn’t I just went out the other way open to me. The other way he’d missed. The other way to freedom!

I wasn’t the first to escape. That honour fell to Les. We had a dual escape going on, the other escapee being Deigo. This was presenting Jonathan with some hard decisions to make. We liked watching him squirm!

I was getting very few opportunity cards to help my escape because I was doing my usual rolling high! While Les was pulling loads of them.

We did find that maybe the rule about getting of solitary was maybe a little broken. The rules state you needed to roll a double to get out. So we found there were sometimes several turns where you could do nothing while you waited to roll that double to get some-one out, or draw an opportunity card that got a pow out. We may house rule this next time to even things out.

I’d highly recommend this blast from the past, if you can get a copy (Esdevium had sold out before they did their weekly update sheet!!) I will warn you it’s a long game. We cut our game short because of time, we’d taken 30 turns approximately in 2 hours. So you may want to pencil in an afternoon playing this.

This was a really fun evening of gaming. A great way to start half term.