Grublin Games unveils Perfect Crime

In the latest issue of Tabletop Gaming (on sale now) and as part of our UK Games Expo preview, Grublin Games gave us the first early details about its new game. However the ever helpful Rosie at Grublin had her hands tied slightly, as the details were so early she couldn't really elaborate on many of the details and some aspects - including the name - were shrouded in mystery. Well, now Grublin's founder Henry Jasper has finally cracked open the safe to reveal more about his new game: Perfect Crime. We'll let him take over... 

At the end of May this year we're going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign for our new game 'Perfect Crime', to be released in Essen in October this year. Perfect Crime is a modern day, multi-layered, asymmetrical bank robbery game with hidden information, tonnes of tension and is based on real life and filmic heists. It's a game for 2+ players and takes about 45 mins to play.

At the start of the game, players choose which side they're on either as the bank or the team planning to break in. Playing as the bank, you have a deconstructed plan of the bank which you'll be upgrading your security, hiring staff, setting patrols, laying traps and doing what banks do best: making money.

As a robber, it's your job to bypass all that security, steal the loot and make a mockery of all those carefully planned defences...but without getting caught. To do that you will assemble a crack team of specialists, equip tools, weapons, case the joint, do the job and make your getaway. The only question is how much planning you're going to put into it.

The game plays over 10 days, during which the robbers can make as many break-ins as they reckon they can get away with.

Why are we making a Heist game?

Knowing that one of things we do best at Grublin is creating highly thematic games, we've been searching for the theme for this game for a while now. Previous incarnations of Perfect Crime have seen it as a survival horror game, a super villain vs. super agent game and even briefly a kind of 'supernatural throwdown' game...until I realised how much interesting it was learning how to rob banks...which is essentially what I've been doing for the last 6 months ;)

What we figured was that those other themes, although fun, were feeling just a bit too abstract and weren't really meaty enough; so with Perfect Crime we've been able to include tonnes of information from real life bank robberies, as well as everything (ok, let's say ~80% ;) that we've all seen happen in movies.

Every one of us has already seen a bunch of heist films and whenever there is a multi-million dollar/euro/pound robbery, it tends to get a lot of press attention (especially when the robbers get away with it!).

The idea has been to create a game where you already know how it should work and what sort of things should be possible, so the thematic depth of the game isn't compromised as the mechanical scope is extra intuitive.

Want to pull of something like the Banco Central Heist (Brazil)? totally fine, but what tools did they use? Have you planned for a possible Heat-style shootout if it goes Reservoir Dogs and you need to get out of there in a hurry? Have you got a good enough fence in case you steal anything specialised?

That's assuming you can actually pull this off. How are you going to dig a tunnel if the bank has installed a load of trembler alarms? What about motion detectors in the vault? What if there are more guards than you were expecting? What if the CCTV cameras covering the bank are externally monitored, do you need to cut the phoneline first? What if the lock on the vault door is too complex, what happens if hostages are taken...is your crew stable or have you employed some...liabilities?

We really wanted to make a game that allows the possibility of doing everything that happens in real-life, as well as in every heist movie you've ever seen so whether you're planning a Hatton Gardens style robbery that goes off like something from an Oceans film...it still has the ability to descend into a frantic Reservoir Dogs-esq scramble to get to safety.

What do you guys mean by 2+ players?

At the moment Perfect Crime works really, really well as a 2 player game. However we've been testing it with larger numbers of players which works also, but I'm still undecided if adding more players is the right thing for this game. Considerations such as the playing time and the tempo of the game (more tempo actually) come into play so I want to get more feedback on how larger numbers of players feel before making the number of players more concrete.