Hunt down by a sea monster during a dive, you find shelter when open an old hatch. Find a way to resurface! Escape Room: The Game is in our opinion the most immersive of the major escape room brands, because it’s not just cards. The game actually contains physical components, including the chrono decoder, which has a timer on it and requires physical keys to open. Standing blinking in the daylight, thrilled, breathing gradually returning to normal, the last hour – a dizzy rush of triumph and frustration, immediately wanting to talk through a detailed post-mortem then to do it all again. That is my recollection of completing an escape room. A ‘real’ escape room.

It will also contribute to the atmosphere around the table with its music tailored to each adventure, awful penalties ... and fatal countdown! Like many other escape room board games, this one isn’t reusable if you obey all the commands of the game.

Escape Room In A Box is the newest series of escape room games, and it’s by far the best one in our opinion. It takes the successful concept of its predecessors of an in house escape room with puzzles, but it smooths out all the rough edges and adds many creative new types of puzzles and challenges. Imperial operatives impound your ship and confiscate everything in your cargo bay. You know it is only a matter of time before they take a close look and discover Jabba‘s hidden illegal goods. There‘s no time to waste. You need to break out of your cell, rescue your astromech and get hold off the cargo. Then all you need to do is recover your ship and escape! Escape Room: The Game also does the best job in terms of tailoring its editions to a specific audience. They have a special family edition, a 2 player edition and a virtual reality edition. And all of them contain multiple escape rooms so they’re good value for your money. Echo Base, an important Rebel stronghold, has managed to remain hidden on the ice planet Hoth for some time. The hostile climate provides excellent cover and protection from the Empire- but you must always remain vigilant! First off we want to say that all these brands make great games, and we’ve had fun playing all of them. We don’t think any of them is strictly better than another, but depending on your taste you’ll still have a favorite.

The Boogymen have invaded William’s dreams! Unite your forces to chase them and soothe the little boy. Escape the Room is most family friendly. And especially The Cursed Dollhouse is outstanding with it’s physical components.

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How many? That depends on how you feel. For an intimate, romantic tete a tete this will work very nicely. There are not so many clues thrown in on each card as to overwhelm a situation. With two people the challenge will work best if approached in a linear fashion. For a more frantic, almost scatter gun approach, with four or more, you could easily “divide and conquer”. One player will need to control the flow of information and enter values into the app. The more the merrier. This also means alternative viewpoints or ways of thinking are more likely to be expressed. One or two of the puzzles are certainly quite obscure. I personally think the sweet spot is four players. A nice feature of these games is that, although the target to complete each one is sixty minutes, if players take longer than this, then the game continues and without the need to restart the game from the beginning. Players who exceed the sixty-minute mark will receive a lower overall grading at the end of the game. I didn’t fall as hard for Scheherazade’s Last Tale as I did The Night of the Boogeymen, but I did still enjoy the scenario. From the start I was impressed: there was great music, funny elements, and a new, ingenious means of “traveling” around to various locations. The puzzles were relatively simple and, in spite of a few ambiguous moments, there wasn’t anything too difficult to solve (even if it meant doing so through trial-and-error). In the second game, “Arsene lupin and the Great White diamond”, players are a group of orphans racing to find a diamond which has been hidden. The treasure hunt has been commissioned by Arsene Lupin and whoever find the diamond first will work with him and would not have to worry about their future. The scenario has a twist as there are some false leads in the game that could cost you precious time.