You’ve heard the story. Boy meet girl. Girl chases boy. Boy leaps off building, evades federal marshals with the help of a nightclub’s smoke machine, wades through the sewer, and boards a plane to a non-extradition nation.

It’s been a hot minute since I wrote about Fugitive, Tim Fowers’ highwire hidden movement game. There’s now a second edition out. I wasn’t anticipating that I would play it, let alone write about it, but it’s stolen my heart all over again.

That awkward moment when you forget which restaurant you were supposed to meet at.

Unlike the recent trend of second editions that bear only a passing resemblance to their original incarnations, there’s no difference between Fowers’ first and second take on Fugitive. As before, this is a hidden movement game that leans into the abstract, locations depicted not by a map but by simple numbered cards.

The interplay between hunter and hunted is simple enough on paper. The titular fugitive begins on card zero and is trying to reach card 42. He accomplishes this by leapfrogging from one location to the next, at most jumping three digits at a time, unless he spends other cards to “sprint” an extra step or two per card. There’s an element of resource management to consider. Because the fugitive only draws one card per turn, two if he declines to play a new hideout, every card spent sprinting is another card he won’t have access to in the future. Then again, maybe the expenditure is worth the effort, letting him arrive at later destinations sooner — or trick his pursuer into thinking that’s the play.

His pursuer, meanwhile, is a federal marshal armed only with a handy notebook. Her task is similarly obvious when described in the raw. She draws a card on her turn as well, eliminating possible hideouts one by one. She also guesses where her quarry might be hiding, sometimes doubling or tripling up her guesses. This latter option is loaded, though. If she gets even one location wrong, the whole guess is negated. So there’s some delicacy to her work, veering between scalpel-like deductions that encompass multiple locations and smaller fishing expeditions to ferret out individual digits.

There’s always been an element of guessing to hidden movement, especially in the early stages before deduction becomes possible, and Fugitive thrives in the static-charged space between blind guessing and educated guessing. It’s delightfully asymmetric despite containing no overhead to speak of, and is short enough that even a blowout doesn’t land too harshly. There’s a tidy dose of luck at play, but not quite as much as newcomers might expect. It’s a sublime morsel all around.

The SHIFT System affords the Fugitive new options for escape…

So what’s the point of the second edition? The cards are nicer, printed on the same durable material that made Radlands so pleasant to handle. The box is smaller, too, only a bit chunkier than an ordinary deck of playing cards.

But those are both the stuff of second printings, not so much the stuff of an updated edition. Fugitive’s sole addition is more significant: the SHIFT System. Yes, the very same SHIFT System from perhaps the most subversive hidden movement game ever designed, Mind MGMT.

If you haven’t heard of the SHIFT System, think of it as a metagame seesaw. If we play Fugitive and I lose, I then get to draw two special cards and choose one to keep. This card unlocks a new ability that I can deploy in our next session. The more I lose, the better my tools become, gradually tipping the scales in my favor. When I finally win, maybe as a result of the new abilities I’m packing, you do the same thing, drawing your own special tools to counteract my own.

Mind MGMT went all-out with its SHIFT System. Every unlock allowed you to unlock a little box that spilled out new cards, tokens, characters, and rules. These were persistent across games, generating a multi-session metagame that was, at times, as much a memory game as a contest of skill. When my group reached the end and played with every single box at the same time, it was… well, it was a mess. A delightful mess, but a mess nonetheless.

Fugitive shows more restraint. Also, it’s a card game rather than a whole big thing. Rather than unlocking extra boxes, its take on the SHIFT System is limited to single cards. Each is split into two halves, the first bestowing a new option to the fugitive and the other helping the marshal. Earning an ability not only gives you a new ability, it also blocks your opponent from ever gaining its counterpart.

…while the Marshal gets new tools of pursuit.

For such a compact and straightforward game, Fowers has milked Fugitive for quite a few ways to tip the scales. The fugitive might find himself in possession of running shoes, effectively a reusable sprint card; a free hideout in the form of the safe house; or an absolutely annoying perk that functions like a sprint, but if included as part of a multi-guess by the marshal always results in a false negative. The marshal’s tools obviously elevate her ability to suss out the fugitive’s location, including one that forces him to confess how many locations in a multi-guess were correct, a forensics team that tallies the sum of sprint cards at a location, and one that alters the endgame entirely.

There are only eight cards altogether — sixteen abilities, then — but they alter the way Fugitive is best played. Where one session with the original edition was probably enough to get the feel for what Fowers was doing, now Fugitive begs for multiple hands. I’ve been playing best of three or five. This generates a tidy back and forth between hunter and hunted, each character gaining new tricks and adjusting to those of their rival. It self-balances to some degree, letting newcomers take home some wins, without totally obviating the game’s careful bluffing and guesswork. Ryan Goldsberry’s illustrations still tell a story — my nine-year-old insisted on fanning out the cards and relating the whole story to me — but the more interesting tale is the multi-session pursuit between players. In this sense, each new SHIFT card is another beat in an escalating game of cat and mouse.

It’s a tidy package.

The beauty of the whole thing is that Fugitive hasn’t really changed. It’s still one of the simplest hidden movement games out there. Now, however, there’s room for each chase to differentiate itself. I eventually traded away the original because I’d seen all it had to offer, and done so in relatively short order. While this edition might eventually reach a similar destination, there’s so much more to see along the way that I’m happy to travel its paths a few more times. Fugitive was always a gem. Now it’s a gem worth inspecting many times over.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided. Also, I know Tim Fowers personally. He bought me lunch a few weeks back — a really nasty Navajo taco, which was neither Navajo nor a taco — but this was repayment for a group lunch I’d purchased a few months earlier. I didn’t keep receipts, so I don’t know if he repaid every penny, but in terms of meal quality I’m pretty sure he still owes me.