Box One By Neil Patrick HarrisTheory11 OnlineEscape roomTabletopI really don’t want to spoil anything about Box One, so I will say this is an experience that deserves to be played by fans of escape rooms and puzzles. Neil Patrick Harris’ involvement in this game is far more than just sticking his name on the box. His personality and creativity embody the box. The further you get down the riddles, the more apparent this is and the more clever and surprising the puzzles get. Try it! Also, even though it says it’s meant for one, I played with 2 players as I usually do most escape rooms. It’s technically replayable if you ever want to share the game with a friend!
Escape From the Maze of the MinotaurSolve Our ShirtsEscape roomTabletopYup, escape rooms come in shirt form now! The Solve Our Shirt series of actual wearable T-Shirts filled with puzzles and other secrets come from the incredibly bright minds at CU Adventures in Time and Space, who have also designed some of my favorite escape rooms to this day. Escape From the Maze of the Minotaur is essentially a tabletop game with accompanying paper materials, online browser website for inputting answers, and some other hidden goodies. The only difference is you also interact with a shirt, which by the way, feels nice and looks good, even though it’s a bit of a loud design. The puzzles are surprisingly devious and take a lot of time, even though there aren’t many. I’m amazed by what was hidden in plain sight on the shirt, and I love the different ways I got to interact with this wearable fabric. Note that you don’t have to wear the shirt while playing, but you can certainly wear it after! It’s a fun unique take on escape room games that doubles as a souvenir! You can buy it online or in person if you go to their physical location in southern Illinois.
Unlock! Heroic AdventuresSpace CowboysEscape roomTabletopThis set of Unlock! escape games featured 3 of my favorite themes: video games, Sherlock, and Alice in Wonderland. So it was a must play for me! The games themselves are quite complex, especially if you’re newer to Unlock’s style of mixing and matching inventories of cards to discover new cards. It ends up being not as intuitive in Alice, the hardest game in the set, since the rules are all but thrown out the window. That said, the games reference the source material: you get to solve a mystery in Sherlock and get game items in the retro game world. I especially liked how the Sherlock case felt like a fast escape room version of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. The required app is easy to use to input codes from and ask for hints. It also does neat things with the camera and AR. However again, when the rules are so broken and abstract like in Alice, it’s hard to even know if you’re following the logic correctly. It ends up being hard to ask for hints too since the app only gives numerical inputs for hints. Overall, not the best Unlock! game to start with (oops for us) but a fun choice especially if you are a fan of the themes like I am.
Star Wars Unlock! The Escape GameSpace CowboysEscape roomTabletopStar Wars Unlock! The Escape Game by Space Cowboys is a set of 3 games based on the franchise. The games are card-based, though there are also digital elements that we used our smartphones for. The cards test you on several puzzles, very similarly to other escape tabletop games like Exit, and task you to find correct solution cards in order to win. The different games, one based on Hoth, another on an Imperial Star Destroyer, and yet another on a moon, are all playable independently and have their own sets of puzzles. My favorite aspect of this as opposed to other similar titles, is that you have an RPG-style inventory of certain cards. By adding numbers on the cards, you can effectively “combine” them into new item cards or into new ways to solve a problem. Some cards are “junk” cards and they represent incorrect answers, but we felt smart anytime we used the current cards in our inventory to create an answer out of thin air. It’s a clever video game-style way to handle card-based escape games. The Star Wars theming makes it perfect for fans of the series, although the games don’t really go too hard into it beyond references. So casual fans or even non-fans of Star Wars can get into it!
Kidnapped in Fortune CityEXIT: The GameEscape roomTabletopReally liked this one! I wasn’t actually expecting this game to be a whodunnit mystery, and as a huge fan of the genre, I was pleasantly surprised! Wouldn’t have expected it from the Western setting, but I appreciated it nonetheless. I liked the nonlinear nature of visiting locations in any order to solve puzzles within. The puzzles were shockingly fairly easy for a 3.5/5 difficulty game. I think what made it easy was the fact that once I chose a location, I had to commit to solving that puzzle to move on. As a result, I generally only had the clues to that puzzle in front of me at any given time. And those puzzles weren’t too hard in the first place. The mystery was really fun to deduce!
The Catacombs of HorrorEXIT: The GameEscape roomTabletopThis EXIT game is literally double the size and length of a standard EXIT game. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, however. What’s good about this one is the sheer scope of how many puzzles you get to do before the end. Unfortunately, we found the final puzzle to be a bust. You have to use external (and potentially hazardous if you are not careful) sources to solve it, and even then, it’s very obtuse and we just didn’t get it. Worse, due to the nature of the puzzle, you only get one chance or you fail… There’s also a stinker of a puzzle midway through, due to the flimsiness of the materials, and the precision needed to come to the solution. Other puzzles were good, though, not mind-blowing, but the kind of deviousness we’ve come to expect from EXIT, plus spicy puzzles that can only be accomplished with the game’s doubled size. It’s really spooky though, so it nails being a scary tabletop game.
The Return to the Abandoned CabinEXIT: The GameEscape roomTabletopOne of my favorite Exit tabletop games! Thanks to the 3D setup for the cabin, it’s one of the most similar to an actual escape room. As a sequel to one of the 1st ever Exit games, this one was a lot more devious in its design and solutions. Lots of tricky out of the box puzzles, and even one or two that “wowed” us. And I don’t even expect to get “wowed” by tabletop games, but Exit continues to surprise me with new, clever tricks. I was possibly more “wowed” here than in some real escape rooms, and that’s saying a lot! Would return again!
The Treasure Trove Of Pirate CoveSolve Our ShirtsEscape roomTabletopCU Adventures in Time and Space, a superb escape room venue in Urbana-Champaign, IL, have somehow come up with the novel concept of fitting an entire escape room game onto a shirt. All the puzzles are solved by examining and searching the packed design of this T-shirt - both front and back. You also need to use several papers, an online browser website for inputting answers, and quite a few other props including a bottle that comes with the shirt itself. The game has a lot of personality. A lot of it comes through in the detail-packed shirt, and also through fun audio clips. There are quite a bit of puzzles here, and the game will run at least an hour for most people. A lot of the game feels like a Where’s Waldo search which was a bit overwhelming due to the loud shirt. But the puzzle payoffs and endgame surprised were worth it! And you get to wear the shirt after!
Sherlock Holmes Détective Conseil [Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective]Space CowboysEscape roomTabletopI absolutely love this series! They’re more tabletop text adventure mysteries than escape rooms per se. But that’s why I love them as a huge fan of murder mysteries and Sherlock Holmes. You play as the Baker Street Irregulars and follow leads by using an address book and investigating wherever you think it’s necessary. I love that the game doesn’t hold your hand. It allows you to figure out on your own what you need to do and how to find out where to go. At the end, whenever you decide you are “done” investigating, you have to answer a quiz that will determine whether or not you’ve figured out the solution, culprit, motive, and other important details. You’re scored on how well you did, and how many more leads it took you to find the answer vs. Sherlock. Though Sherlock “cheats” by knowing which minimum leads are important, so we just consider it a win if we solve the case at all! Overall, with many cases in the series, it’s highly recommended for mystery fanatics! I’ve spent so many hours thinking about every single case!
The Gate Between WorldsEXIT: The GameEscape roomTabletopThis is a tough tabletop escape game that literally requires out-of-the-box thinking and ingenuity. Much of the puzzles revolve around a central item, and it’s actually quite clever how the game keeps innovating how the item is used. Another central mechanic is the different worlds, and I was impressed by all the puzzles hidden within each one. It took us a long time to get through this one, but since it’s one you do at home, you can take it at your own pace. Be warned that once it’s technically a game you can only play once.
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