No Mistakes Only Deeper Plans

No Mistakes, Only Deeper Plans is a game of a heist movie or a heist movie of a game.

The basic premise is simple and the execution is also beautifully simple.

The mechanic is basically a generous PBTA. 7 to 9 is a hit and 10+ is a hit and a bonus. 6- returns characters to a Planning Scene where it is revealed that no mistake has been made but instead only a deeper level of planning. Once the Planning Scene is complete a new Heist scene is played out. Failure is therefore impossible until the final Vault scene starts.

One nice aspect of the initial Planning Stage is that it provides a kind of scaffold for the game which is often missing from 200 Word RPGs. Instead you kind of have an outline of all the key plot beats you need to hit.

However if you make a bit of mistake during that phase and add in some requirement that ends up feeling like a tangent or unnecessary now you’re actually playing the heist then you don’t have a way to edit it. During our game for example we had the crew split up initially and needing to regroup but actually the interesting challenge was smuggling in the equipment required for the heist.

The game’s feel in play is suitably gripping with a bit of tension on each roll but a feeling of rolling with the punches and making progress that something like Blades in the Dark can lack. The biggest thing that this game does compared to bigger takes on the same theme is focus on the feel of a heist story. The bits that go to plan and make you feel like a smart operator and the bits that come unstuck and make you scramble as a player to put the story back together again.

It has quite a strong game design to it instead of getting lost in try to simulate the elements of the heist or the skills of the criminals involved.

A worthy finalist and a game that is worth giving a go or even using as a base for your own hacks.

Questions

When an action fails should the player narrate a failure before returning to the Planning Stage? I kind of felt they should with the problem the failure results in being the springboard for the twist that will be discovered in the Planning Stage. However that creates a bit of burden on the player to create something suitable in the moment.

On reflection I think it is better to cut back to the Planning Stage and start the discussion knowing that this part of the plan won’t work. This allows all the players to make suggestions as to why the action won’t work and how to take advantage of it.

This also stops the player failing from giving into the temptation to narrate a mistake. As the game suggests there are no mistakes but it is natural to narrate a failure this way.

The game also mentions a order to taking scenes but no explanation of how that works and it feels like it really matters in the endgame. It made sense for us prior to the endgame to just pass scenes back and forth according to which character was due to take the lead in the next element of the plan.