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Tabletop Game / The Grape Escape (1992)

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Make them! Take them! To the factory! Mash them! MASH THEM! Now they're history!

The Grape Escape is a 3D board game for two to four players. Each player is a "grape" that must escape the juice factory. They form clay grapes from Play-Doh with an included mold, to use as their playing pieces. They then travel around the conveyor belt style board covered by a Rube Goldberg Device. Taking turns to follow the set path through the machine advancing to the roll of the die. One face of die forces that player not to move, but to operate the hand cranked mechanism, which stomps, rolls and cuts away. Any player piece that occupies these hazard spaces when its in motion, will be physically disfigured or decapitated. If you get squished, you have to remold your grape and start over.

The game was released in by Parker Brothers in 1992. Now absorbed into Hasbro (and licensed by Rehtmeyer Inc.), the game was remade in 2010 as "Smashed Potatoes" with the same game play, but with potatoes instead of grapes, and the die was replaced with a spinner. It has since been discontinued.

Not to be confused with The California Raisins: The Grape Escape.


The Grape Escape includes these tropes:

  • Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The four molded player piece "grapes" made from Play-Doh can be any color you choose (providing you have the modelling tub you want as they're sold separately).
  • Continuing is Painful: If your grape figure gets destroyed, you're not eliminated but you have to re-mold your player piece, and go back to the start space. If this happens too often it can result in you losing the game.
  • Giant Foot of Stomping: One of the hazards on the board you are required to avoid, or get flattened trying.
  • In a Single Bound: The Grape Leap roll allows the player to jump ahead one space of the "grape" in the lead.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Whether your "grape" survives, or gets annihilated in the factory, is all down to the roll of the dice.
  • Made of Plasticine: Your playing piece is a "grape" (not too dissimilar from the Ribena grape characters) made from Play-Doh and will get brutally mashed up in the factory if you're not lucky.
  • Pun-Based Title: Of The Great Escape.
  • The Many Deaths of You: All the hazards can horribly maim and mangle your "grape" piece if anyone rolls a Turn Crank from the die while it occupies these stations.
  • Rube Goldberg Device: The conveyor belt style board obstacles for the players include a large scissors, a steam roller, a large saw blade, and a grape stomping boot all activated by lever and rubber band. (In Smashed Potatoes, the grape stomping boot was replaced with a french fryer.)

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