Escape From New York Is Getting a New Board Game

The cult classic Escape From New York is getting a new board game. Pendragon Game Studios has announced plans to publish a board game based on the John Carpenter classic, with players controlling Snake, Brain, Maggie, and Cabbie as they try to rescue the president and smuggle him out of Manhattan, which was transformed into a massive prison colony prior to the start of the movie. Gameplay details were not revealed, but Escape From New York: The Board Game will be designed by Kevin Wilson, the designer of numerous popular games including Descent: Journeys Into the Dark, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, and Arkham Horror. Escape From New York: The Board Game will have a Kickstarter campaign that will launch in late 2022. 

Escape From New York was originally released in 1981 and quickly became a cult classic film. Kurt Russell starred in the movie as Snake Plissken, an ex-Special Forces soldier turned mercenary who found himself forcibly recruited for a mission to rescue the President of the United States after the President’s plane crashed into the prison colony Manhattan.  The movie continued the collaboration between Carpenter and Kurt Russell, which continued with The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and several other classic films. Carpenter also made a sequel to Escape From New York titled Escape From L.A., which also starred Russell. 

Pendragon Game Studio previously published a popular board game based on another John Carpenter classic – The Thing. That game raised over $450,000 in a Kickstarter campaign and eventually made its way to a wide retail release. 

Surprisingly, this isn’t the first board game based on Escape From New York. In 1981, TSR Inc. (the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons) published their own board game version of Escape From New York. In that game, players had to collect clue cards to rescue the president while using equipment cards to fight hostile enemies. Like the movie, players had only two options to escape – a stealth glider parked on top of the World Trade Center or across a mine-laden bridge.