Grape Escape!

 Video review here!

Here’s a game I used to love as a kid, Grape Escape! Although this is undoubtedly a children’s game don’t be fooled...this game has a very dark side to it. 

Released by Parker in 1992, it’s one of those games that appeals to me, namely one which has a ton of plastic bits to the actual board. There’s a lot to this game, don’t worry, unlike Mousetrap where you build the mechanism up over the course of the game, this is built up before the game starts, that’s right, the trap is in play from the get go!



Your play pieces are made from Playdoh and there’s a very good reason for this. You pick your favourite colour, whilst savouring that fantastic Playdoh smell, and you use a plastic mould to shape up your play pieces. Trim the excess off, and you’re good to go. Even though you only play with one piece at a time the instructions advise you to make two play pieces and the reason becomes abundantly clear as you start to play. 

You roll the dice to move, the furthest you move can move is four spaces, this because two sides of the dice have other actions. You start in the barrel and navigate along the conveyor belts to the finish. The objective of the game is to safely navigate your way around the board through the grape juice factory (come on, we all know it’s wine…) and to the finish, pretty simple really. Except you have to go through the grape juicing machine, which will cut, stomp, mangle and saw your grapes to pieces… 

As mentioned before the dice has two unique sides, grape leap and crank. Grape leap means you move one space ahead of the leading player, incredibly useful or if you are the leading player, move one ahead. Crank is the die roll you either relish or dread… it means you crank the machine’s handle and put it into motion. Any grapes that are in the machine are cut to pieces, rolled flat and mulched, grizzly! If there’s no grape in the machine that player then pics a grape to put into the machine! This adds a very vindictive and ruthless element to the game. Stick that leading player under the saw, that’ll teach them to be winning! 

The boot I get, after all, traditionally grapes were trod upon to make wine but the saw?! This is outright sadistic! When you really think about what you're doing, it's incredibly violent! There’s the scissors that cut them in half and the most torturous method, the roller, start with the feet first..make him suffer! 

When a grape is mulched up, it’s back to the start. See why the instructions ask you to make more than one grape? It’s all but inevitable that you’re going to get killed in this game at some point and you’ll be regularly making a fresh back up. 

Grape leap and crank die roles can really change the fortunes of a game for players. You’re not safe just because you’ve past the saw, the final trap on the board. Someone can just roll a crank and move you under a trap. Similarly, someone right at the back of the game can roll a grape jump and be brought right to the front. It’s fun to see someone go from winning to rank last in a single dice roll and vice versa. 





I’ve played this again recently with friends on a board game night and it’s a riot. It’s a simple game to play and learn and it’s more or less luck of the dice roll that determines the winner. That being said, it’s incredibly satisfying to smash to bits your opponents play piece, i can't think of many other games that let you do this. Oh, and your hands will have that wonderful Playdoh smell on them for hours after.