Here's a mad bit of board game history.
Pat Reid designed Escape from Colditz (1973) based on his own experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II. Captured by the Germans in 1940, he refused to sit still - organising breakouts across multiple POW camps until the Germans lost patience and shipped him to Colditz Castle, Nazi Germany’s highest-security camp for Allied officers' most stubborn escape artists.
The Germans thought concentrating these guys in one place was a masterstroke. It wasn't. It turned into a giant Nazi-themed escape room filled with highly skilled participants. More than 300 escape attempts were recorded, around 120 prisoners made it out of the castle, and roughly 31 actually reached Allied or neutral territory.
Compared to the horrors of concentration or forced labour camps, Colditz was quite civilized. Getting caught escaping meant solitary confinement or docked privileges rather than a bullet to the head. Prisoners retained their military ranks, received packs of ciggies and food parcels from the Red Cross, and were shielded from forced labour under the Geneva Convention.
Without wanting to downplay how grim this must have been, these guys were allowed to stage theatre productions, run orchestras and organise sports competitions. Not exactly a 5-star hotel, but anything beyond a kick up the arse from a Nazi prison camp is, perhaps, unexpected.
The cat-and-mouse rivalry between prisoners and guards became a constant tactical contest of schemes and countermoves that occasionally, improbably, curdled into something resembling mutual respect. Disguises were a popular escape tactic - dressing in drag, passing as civilian workers, or brazening it out in stolen German uniforms.
At the more ambitious end of the spectrum, prisoners cobbled together an entire glider from scavenged materials, its fabric stiffened with porridge-soaked bed covers. The plan was to build a rooftop runway and catapult the thing across the Mulde River valley using a cement-filled bathtub as a counterweight - like something straight out of a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The war ended before anyone got to find out how that would've panned out.
Tunnel digging got so out of hand that prisoner groups from different nations were sometimes breaking into each other's tunnels by accident - like a high stakes multiplayer game of Dig Dug. During one rugby match, two prisoners quietly slipped into a drain while a conveniently timed scrum took place directly over the top of them. Others used "ghost" prisoners - men who'd hide inside the castle while a fellow inmate made a break for it, then impersonate the escapee during roll calls to buy the real one a head start.
As for Pat Reid himself, he was one of the lucky few who pulled it off. One night, deep in the small hours, he and three fellow prisoners cut through the bars of the kitchen window and hauled themselves onto the roof of the German kitchen below. Somehow, impossibly, they crossed a floodlit courtyard without a single guard noticing, and melted into the shadows of a cellar beneath the Kommandantur - the commandant's own headquarters..
From there, the four men squeezed themselves through a narrow air shaft leading out to the dry moat beyond the castle walls. Reid later described the experience as being "squeezed through a hole in the wall like toothpaste out of a tube".
Once outside, they split into pairs. Armed with forged papers and disguised as Flemish workmen, Reid and his companion boarded a train and travelled openly through the heart of Nazi Germany, heading south towards Munich and across the Swiss border into freedom on 18 October 1942.
