Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
For some reason I thought fleeing an encroaching office fire would be less stressful than this.
Run for Your Lives!
Emergency Exit Only is a strange beast, a tile layer in which success or failure comes down to how good you are with spatial reasoning and memory. That will sound like a nightmare to some of you, and I get it. I can only assuage your concerns by emphasizing the degree to which this game is funny. Like That’s Not a Hat or the substantially more involved Galaxy Trucker before it, Emergency Exit Only is better when someone fails.
The goal is to get yourself to the end of an eternal, Severance-esque corridor, with a fire hot on your heels the entire time. You take turns adding a tile to the path, but the tiles are placed one atop the other. Only one is ever visible at any given time. Rather than seeing your path unfold before you, you are forced to picture it in your mind’s eye.
This means, rather inevitably, that mistakes will be made. If you think the path has hit a dead end, looped back onto itself, or that an otherwise invalid tile was played, you can place your player marker on the stack instead of a tile. This marks for posterity where you think things went wrong. Once all but one player has opted out, the tiles are laid out on the table along both the X and Z axes rather than the Y, and any player markers that come immediately after the moment when disaster well and truly struck are given a point.
Disaster comes in three varieties, all of them good comedy. Variety number one, the most straightforward, is when someone plays a tile that transparently does not work. They realize it, you realize it, everyone realizes it, and their tile is immediately followed by an unhesitating one-two-three of each other player putting their player marker on the pile.
Variety number two comes when one player marks a failure that nobody else believes. Play continues for everyone else, as that one player sits there with arms crossed, a smug smile on their lips that says, “Sure, sure, you all can keep running from the fire if you want, but for the record? This is where we died.”
The third variety, the most satisfying, comes with laying out the tiles and realizing that the player in the aforementioned scenario was wrong.
The best thing about Emergency Exit Only is its insistence that the moral victory is the only one that matters. You all die in the fire—the player markers represent you finding an exit if I understand the manual correctly, but let’s not kid ourselves, you’re playing to a dead end. To the people who realized it first go the spoils. I’m Technically Correct, the Best Kind of Correct: The Board Game. Excellent. I’d play any time.
