Overview & How to Play

The goal of How to Rob a Bank is for the robbers to collectively steal a bunch of money.

Namely, moneybags over the course of 3 rounds. The bank’s goal is to survive 3 rounds by having the robbers not steal that much money.

The gameplay loop just has each player programming a card—that is, placing a card face down from their hand to be activated later. This programming keeps happening until 5 cards have been programmed from each player. Then, everyone flips their 5 card pile over, resolving one card at a time in clockwise order.

The cards themselves can do simple stuff like moving your robber on the board. Or allow that robber to run multiple times. Or the security guards have the ability to lock money, and the robbers can in turn unlock it. Likely most importantly, one of these cards will pick up the money you’re actually here to steal. Then that money has got to find its way to the getaway car outside the bank.

In terms of offensive cards, guards can tackle robbers, and robbers can pepper spray guards.

Last note: robbers cannot interact with tokens in any way if there’s a guard standing there… that’s where pepper spray comes in to knock them out for a bit, ouch.

Pros

How to Rob a Bank (what a name) is quite accessible, with player aids for everything, with nice wooden figures, including a wooden car! Setup is also super clean and fast, with each player just grabbing their cards, and board being quickly assembled.

Gameplay is filled with plenty of good options for how simple the game is. There’s an alarm that is a huge factor in this, which is a mini-objective to contest that pulls all of the security guards to it when a robber pulls it. On the flip side, the bank also has to worry about spreading themselves out too thin if they defend the alarm, potentially leaving more moneybags open.

The game prevents a lot of frustration by letting players do their turn’s actions in any order. So luckily, you don’t have to quite meticulously plan every detail of your heist out. This robbing of a bank is light, yet still full of depth when considering the different ways to sequence actions.

There’s also a surprisingly decent amount of lines of play here. You can rush bags, rush the alarm, use your teleport card first turn, save it to get away with a money bag, and the guards can position themselves aggressively or defensively ,depending on if they wanna be locking or tackling. Both sides also have powerful cards that can definitely swing the game when used properly—namely the robber’s Teleport and the guards’ Move 3, but they’re decently rare and necessary, since the map is random and can be favorable to either side depending on people’s hands. Plus, even if a board is pretty one sided, there’s always the chance that players mess up their execution because it’s easy to forget what everyone played, so the gameplay always feels healthily varied.

Cons & Nitpicks

Component wise, the cards are REALLY thin and floppy. They’re serviceable, but it feels like in our version (1st Edition), that you can tear them on accident if a bit careless.

How to Rob a Bank also has balancing issues at 2-3 players, because the bank just doesn’t have enough manpower to cover the robbers here. But at the same time, the bank’s tackling felt way stronger because it knocks out half of the robbers’ total force. Also for some reason, 4 money bags to win at this count felt too easy for the robbers, unless they get a bad map or don’t draw Teleport cards. Ultimately, this game plays best at 4 players, with the best balance and opportunity for fun banter, as having more robbers here means much more can go wrong.

Last thing we wanna complain about is the anticlimactic ending if the robbers only need 1 more bag on the last round. Getting only 1 bag in a round is pretty easy to do, and so we wish there was some sort of advantage given to the bank in this case, maybe allowing them to move and rotate a couple tiles around so that the map favors them. This way, the last round AT LEAST becomes more interesting and doesn’t just feel like a free win for the robbers. On the flip side of this, if the robbers need 3 bags in the last round, it feels almost impossible, so maybe then the robbers can alter the map if that’s the case.