Master Thief Review

May 7, 2019 at 4:58am
By Jason Stettner

This is a game about thievery, and the act of besting your fellow criminals of the night. It’s meant for groups of three to six players and takes about twenty minutes to play. It can however be much quicker than that based on the confidence of particular individuals within your group. More on that will follow. Master Thief is a card game that tasks you with collecting special artifacts from a museum and then escaping with them. You can actually choose to do this at any time, it’s an interesting mechanic that will really change things up.

That’s right, you can leave on your own terms when you feel you’ve got enough of a lead to do so. You will have to be careful however, others may block this and that element is a lot of what this is. It’s about making a move, then dealing with the reactions from those you’re competing with. It’s both a cooperative and competitive time. There’s a sort of death warning hanging over your heist as well. If the security is raised too high, everyone essentially loses. You need to keep that down, while bettering everyone else and then getting out of there.

Play your hand of action and reaction cards well, they can turn the tides quickly. At one point you could have that priceless piece of art in your hands, and then in the next moment it could be snatched up by another player. You may need to stash your collected items, or perhaps use a gadget to get the upper hand. The things you can find are always changing and that’s an appealing aspect of this game.

The Board/Pieces
With Master Thief being a card based game you’ll see just shiny cards here. They actually really do have a neat selection of a hundred and twelve cards. There’s also an instructions sheet included and a well noted section for expansion. I actually do think they could do some neat things with this in the future when it comes to expanding the core package further.

A lot of the cards here are simple, they’re an action or reaction. I suppose I should mention gadgets, but you get the point that they’re straight to it. There are also some gray cards that act as an escape and they’ll have a bonus or sort of expectation for your escape. The final and most exciting aspect of this is the treasure you’re seeking. These are sometimes shiny, colorful cards featuring some exquisite items.

You may come across famous works of art, or perhaps some strange other museum items. These particular items grant you additional cards for your hand upon pick-up, have a specific category and a point total. That’s basically it for the pieces and honestly this is a very simple game to understand.

The Conclusion

Master Thief provides an exciting card game that’s easy to understand and a ton of fun to play. It really is simple to grasp concept wise. It perhaps may not seem that way while reading the instructions, but once you get going it’s not difficult to play. We had a lot of fun with this one, and it was an enjoyable experience that we look forward to playing into the future.

That being said, I can see there being some limitations with the setup in terms of the content that’s present. There’s an excellent selection of prizes and a core experience that offers a lot of mix-ups, but it might have some tiring element after multiple plays of going after the same things. I feel that expansions could easily fix that up. It really isn’t a huge negative, this is great fun and it’s competitive. It comes in a nice package and those cards are very clean in presentation. This is a rather unique game, and it has a straight forward point to it.

Master Thief Review
Review Sample Provided by Breaking Games

Rating Overall: 7.5