When you think about your top 3 favorite Christmas movies, do you include Die Hard on that list? If so, this board game adaptation – Die Hard: The Nakatomi Plaza Heist might be right up your alley. This new game from The Op for 2-4 players is a one vs. many game that lets you play out the core parts of the movie. One player plays New York City cop John McClane as he realizes some bad hombres are assaulting the tower, taking hostages, setting up explosives, and unbeknownst to him, trying to crack the vault in the building to steal $640 million. It is up to that player to lead John through the maze of baddies, played by the other 1-3 players, in the Nakatomi skyscraper and thwart their plans.
To start the game, you don’t unfold the board. Instead, the game starts on a quarter of the full board where John has to scrounge for equipment and a pair of shoes that he plucks off of the first bad guy he takes out, while the thieves are nabbing hostages. When play moves to the second and third stages, the board is unfolded a step at a time, exposing bigger play areas for each stage. John and the thieves are represented by small plastic miniatures that don’t have a lot of detail on them, but are at least colored-coded to tell them apart. The rest of the game is played with some cardboard tokens, a few tracking cubes, and some cards with low-resolution mono-color stills from the movie. Overall, the art and components are not where this game shines.
This game really takes off with the theme. You really feel like you are playing pivotal scenes in the movie. John is sneaking through the lower levels, gathering supplies and dispatching thieves that get in his way. The thieves have to track John, capture hostages, and put obstacles in his way, like shattering the glass cubicles to make it harder for him to get through the second stage. All the while the thieves are cracking codes in order to open the vault. In the final stage John has to scare the hostages off of the roof and then swing down on a fire hose to Hans Gruber where he literally has to push him out the window to win the game. If the thieves can crack the final vault code and then place and detonate the explosives before that happens, or rob John of all of his actions, they win the game.
The gameplay comes down to a few simple choices. Choose a card from your hand to make some moves on the board. The execution is a bit different for the 2 teams. John starts with a hand of 5 cards that he chooses 1 from to play each turn. He doesn’t refill his hand until he has played 3 of the 5, discarding the last 2. The actions have simple choices for you to make on the board, like moving, punching, shooting, etc. Success at things like shooting and punching is determined by a d6 die roll. If you can find the radio, you can use it to get Officer Al’s support down on the ground, which in turn levels up your attack ability by adding +1-2 to his die roll. John is a tough guy. He can take down a thief in 1 punch or shot, while the punch or shot from a thief into John will cause him to discard a card from his deck. If the thieves can empty his deck, they win. However, this is very hard to do. Any cards that John plays get carried forward into the next scene along with another stack of cards that are added for each scene. Unless he is very unlucky with his dice rolls, John is unlikely to run out of cards.
However, the thieves can also win if they can crack the vault codes before John sends Hans on a one-way flight from the penthouse. To do this, the thieves will play 3 cards and place them in numerical order, using the middle cards for actions on the board, and the first and last cards for numbers to help crack the vault codes. What makes this even more challenging is that the thieves can’t fully collaborate on which cards they are going to reveal and pick, mimicking the challenges of communicating with each other in the middle of a huge high rise. These asymmetrical goals and skills make the game more thematic, but I don’t think that it is balanced. With John’s ability to go first each turn, better action selection options without hidden information, and a much higher “health” total, it seems hard for him to lose. John’s powers get better with each scene and with the additional support from Officer Al, while the thieves’ vault cracking challenges get harder as the game progresses. If you want to play out the action hero fantasy, a hero with high health and better skills, then this game let’s you do that. A good game from the thieves would be if they made it close, and it would be pretty lucky if they won.
Ultimately, if you are a fan of the movie, then Die Hard will be fun to play. I don’t think it would hold up well to back to back repeated plays, but if it made it to the table once a year after watching this holiday classic, then that might be enough. Yippie-ki-yay, board gamers.
This review is brought to us by our friend and guest writer Jason. He is an avid boardgamer and loves playing games with both family and friends. He enjoys painting miniatures, growing his own tomatoes and feeling like a hero when he is wearing a mask (though comic books led him to believe that would be cooler than it is).
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