Bank Heist
- Board's Eye View
- 18 hours ago
- 4 min read
Designed by Jared Kaplan and Chris Kincaid, Bank Heist is a hidden role social deduction game from Lonely Hero Games where the 5-8 players are together engaged in a bank robbery. Players are all notionally part of the gang executing the heist but, of course, not all are following the same agenda. Some of the players will be Crew, just trying to steal the loot and get away, but others may be Agents - undercover cops who have infiltrated the gang. And that's not all, some may be Rivals - members of another gang of thieves who have also infiltrated the gang and who ultimately want to kill everyone else so they can walk away with the cash.
As with most games of this genre, an 'eyes shut' prelude ensures that Agents know each other and Rivals know each other, but otherwise everyone is in the dark. The Crew's objective is to load the getaway van with five money bags and get away.
The game starts with a quick safecracking round demanding mental maths. Three (1-8) number cards are laid out at random and the, advantageous, first player position is taken by the first player to correctly call out the product of the three numbers (ie: multiplying them all). If anyone calls out a wrong answer, it advances the heist track - so makes it significantly more difficult for the thieves to win; so any wrong calls here are likely to attract suspicion that the sloppy arithmetic is really due to an Agent seeking to sabotage the heist...
Players in turn draw a card from the Vault deck, look at it and pass it to another player of their choice. If it's a money bag a Crew member must load it onto the van; cards showing anything else are kept; they're mostly items that can be used as weapons or protection in the getaway phase of the game. Rivals handed a money bag can choose whether or not to load it onto the van. They are likely to want to complete the heist and try to kill the Crew after the gang's initial getaway with the loot but they are also incentivised to keep a money bag in reserve. Agents, however, must hold onto money bag cards rather than load them up; they will score an early win if the van isn't fully loaded before the gang runs out of time. And just to complicate things further for the gang, one of the Crew members may have a card that identifies him as having 'sticky fingers' - tho' he's Crew, he will always hold onto money bags himself rather than loading them onto the van.
'Sticky fingers' aside, you might think Agents would instantly get denounced when they retain a money bag card handed them by another player but the first two rounds have to be conducted in silence because the bank's alarms have not yet gone off. Recriminations, accusations and denials have to be saved until the third, fourth and fifth rounds of the robbery by which time there's likely to be a cacophony of claims and counterclaims, particularly as in these rounds players also draw cards from an Alarm deck that can be played inter alia to apply an attribute to a player...
Assuming the van gets loaded with its requisite five money bags (never a foregone conclusion as there are only 10 money bag cards in the Vault deck), the game moves to the getaway phase. This is where the 'violence' begins and it's played over four rounds. Players are all equipped with guns and if you're Crew you can either play a card from your hand or shoot another player. Agents are deemed to be wearing a bulletproof vest that protects them from a single shot but the vest is considered to be discarded when used. Declaring the protection of your bulletproof vest reveals that you are indeed an Agent and your reveal also allows you to use handcuffs to restrain another player. Agents can only shoot when returning fire. By contrast, Rivals must always shoot unless restrained, and they can take a second shot - tho' that will mean they are revealing themselves as Rivals.
Whether or not you live through the shootouts, your side wins if your faction is left as the last one standing by the time your getaway van reaches your hideout. If an Agent has survived, the Agents wins; if there's one or more Crew and Rivals still alive when you reach the hideout, the Crew win unless the Rival had held onto a money bag to bribe the getaway driver.
Bank Heist is so reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs that we haven't been able to resist adopting colour names to play as Mr Blue, Mr Orange, Mr Pink etc. If you are playing with a full complement of eight players you'll obviously use all eight role cards but, unlike most other hidden role games you don't adjust the mix of role cards according to the number of players: you always play with the deck of 2 Agents, 2 Rivals, 3 Crew and 1 'sticky fingers' Crew but if you're playing with fewer than eight players you won't know which cards have been left out - so in a five-player game, for example, it's possible that you could find you're playing with 2 Agents, 2 Rivals and the 'sticky fingers' Crew member! The game is still probably at its best with a full complement of eight players but the element of surprise with fewer players injects an added frisson into this highly atmospheric game.