Escape From Flat Earth review—Don’t bother.

Normally I jump into these reviews with something nice to say, I come out with a nice layout for my thoughts and I am ready to go right after. Not this time, this game has shocked me to my damn core. I can’t believe how disappointing this game was for me and it let me down in almost every way.

Before jumping in I want to get a few things out of the way. I normally play heavier games that take a longer time to finish. Arkham Horror is my favorite board game on the planet at this moment. When I play something lighter, I tend to like deck builders, such as Marvel Champions which currently holds the title for being my favorite deck builder. Now I have played smaller games too, Biomos is my most recent, and I had a lot of fun with that game.

I went into Escape from Flat Earth with an open mind, and I was excited to play it. It’s a game that pokes fun at science fiction tropes and that is one of my favorite genres. The artwork is beautiful! The box is something special too, it’s stylized to look like a communicator and even makes a sound when you flip the lid (and sometimes when you move the box at all). This is the complete package on the outside, so where did it all go wrong?

The Rulebook is Awful

The biggest issue with this game is how awful the rulebook is. There are some tongue-in-cheek jokes throughout the rules. I hate those because it makes the readability so much worse. I know that I keep calling the rules a book, but what you’re really getting is a front-and-back pamphlet that gives you a vague understanding of how to play.

In a search for help, I decided to check the website listed on the instruction pamphlet and it doesn’t exist anymore, so that was funny, I guess. Finding out the website doesn’t exist anymore was awful but also played right into the joke that the instructions make this whole game out to be. Now, don’t get me wrong I love that this game pokes fun at science fiction tropes and I think it does a good job at it, but there is a time and a place for that and they did not do a good job at weaving it through the instructions.

The rulebook, frankly, feels incomplete. When they’re talking about what cards to separate from the deck, you have to flip the rules over to learn about the cards they’re talking about. There are no clear pictures for you to look at to get an example: Simply put, this game needs an actual rulebook and not a pamphlet.

So let’s start with the setup and work our way down to this damn pamphlet. Everyone gets dealt a set of 3 red cards, one of which represents the player. The other two…well they’re not described during the setup for some reason, so just trust me.

Next, remove the Event and Attack cards from the remaining cards in the box. At this point, there is no clarification about what these cards look like, but trust me, you’ll get it on the other side of the pamphlet, kind of.

After that, you must shuffle the remaining deck and deal five cards face down to each player. Simple enough, and this step made sense. Now, place all the Event cards and as many Attack cards as there are Red Suits in the game into the deck. What you just did needs to be shuffled again and placed in the middle because it’s the draw pile. Now you have to place the Start card and End card of your choice in the middle of the table and leave some space between them to create your timeline. It took us 10 minutes to find the Start and End cards because again the cards and pamphlets were poorly labeled.

To win this game in a single player you have to just survive. To win when playing with people you have to be the first player to lay a Red Suit on the final Event in the timeline. You can also be the only player with any Red Suits left in their team. Or you could be super unlucky like us and the game will drag on because none of the events are taking anyone out of the game. There is a huge issue with this game and its rules that I go into further in the review but needless to say, the layout of the pamphlet is horrible.

Don’t be fooled, there is no solo play

Everything in this game is built upon player interaction and that’s fine. I got two games done with a friend and we had a great time, but because so much of the game is built upon this interaction, I feel like saying you can play this game solo is false advertising. The game being labeled as 1-6 players is simply not true. It might sound like I am ranting and ‌I am, but that’s because this is a completely frustrating experience.

Group play was for sure an experience

I was okay with letting the solo play go because I did have a few friends to try this game with. These people have helped me play and learn dozens of games and I figured maybe I was just having an off day with the rulebook. Nope!

It took us 45 minutes to get everything set up because of the poor labeling on the cards and rule pamphlet. After we got everything set up and started the game, the lack of clarification slowly started to weigh us down until the game slowly became awful. The big reason why is that the rulebook never tells you when to put red shirts down and end the game. We had to jump online and check some sites and videos to try and get some clarification because again the website doesn’t exist anymore.

Honestly, this was nothing short of a complete disappointment and I would suggest leaving this one in your shopping cart or something. There are much better games that are the same length.

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