The goal in Break the Safe is to save the world in 30 minutes or less. Players work together to infiltrate the "Evil Guy Complex" and unlock the safe where the plans for the Evil Guy Operations are kept, while helping each other to defeat booby traps and avoid the complex's security guard and his vigilant dog.
"Break the Safe is unique in its emphasis on teamwork -- players need to cooperate and communicate with each other in order to beat the clock. They win or lose as a team," said Phil Jackson, vice president of games and puzzles marketing for Mattel, in a press release.
"We believe that this concept will strike a chord with families whose busy, fast-paced lives leave little time for quality family interaction. Break the Safe provides them with an opportunity to have fun, communicate, work together toward a common goal -- all in a set time frame of 30 minutes."
The team of agents faces many obstacles while searching for the four hidden keys that will allow them to unlock the safe and retrieve the Evil Guy Operations documents.
Working their way through the maze of hallways and rooms in the complex, they must use each other's tools to disarm the booby traps that protect the top-secret tiles. While some tiles contain the keys, others represent secret passages to other rooms in the complex; one of the tiles is there to stun you (you lose your next turn), while another is just a decoy and contains nothing.
As the pressure builds for the agents to locate the keys to the safe, they must always be aware of another threat to their mission. The guard and the dog provide security in the Evil Guy Complex and, if awakened, they browse the hallways of the complex.
If any of the agents are detected by either one, they're automatically sent to jail and the mission is derailed. The agents must now rely on their teammates to get out of jail and continue their search for the keys.
The entire team must return to the location of the safe at the end of the game in order to stop the safe's self-destruct mechanism and open it.
