The Great (Pretty Good, At Least) Escape

Last weekend, my friends hosted a gaming/dinner party where only one type of game was on the agenda: escape room games. I've written before on a couple of occasions about escape rooms we've enjoyed. It seems they're enough of a phenomenon that a number of board game manufacturers have tried to package the same kind of experience in a product you can play in your own home.

We got to try a couple different ones at this party, but I'm going to focus on one particular brand in this post -- Exit: The Game. It has the most notoriety at the moment, fresh off a 2017 win of the Kennerspiel des Jahres award (the "expert game of the year" honor given out in the German game industry).

Exit is a game in a rather tiny box, containing just cards, a booklet, and a "decoder wheel." It sells for around $15, and is made to be played just once -- not only will you "solve" the room, you will destroy some of the game components in the course of doing so. Given the notable number of games my group has paid three or four times that amount for and then only played once, this is not a huge ask -- particularly compared to the cost of actually going to an escape room. If the "ticket" is fun enough, it could easily be worth $15.

There are three Exit games so far, each with a different story and setting. (Three more are due to be released soon.) I played two different ones on the night of this dinner party: The Abandoned Cabin (a classic "cabin in the woods" trope) and The Secret Lab (where you must experiment with the chemicals in a laboratory to find escape).

Exit: The Game (in any version) does a great job of recreating just about everything that's key to the escape room experience. There are puzzles to solve of various difficulties, pulling on different kinds of skills. Some are observational, requiring you to notice details in the artwork of cards, while others are the sorts of intuitive and associative leaps that are escape rooms' bread and butter. One of the two games had a fourth-wall breaking puzzle that compromised the flavor of the game and wasn't worth that sacrifice even for the cleverness, in my opinion. Still, the experience of both games was fun overall.

The Secret Lab seemed the far harder of the two to me (and I've heard the third Exit game, an Egyptian themed adventure, is hardest of all). The game does include a card-based hint system if you get stuck, but there's only so effective this can be if the game designers haven't anticipated why and how the players might actually get stuck (which is a tall order). This key interactive element, plus the production values of being inside a constructed environment, are enough that these sorts of games aren't going to replace escape rooms -- not for me at least. But these games were quite a lot of fun, and I look forward to trying the others in the series.

I'd give these Exit: The Game products a B+ (with my specific recommendation being for the Abandoned Cabin installment, if you're going to try just one). If you've enjoyed an escape room before, it's hard to imagine you wouldn't enjoy this.