Super Nova

I've written before about a number of "escape room in a box" products, one-use board games that try to replicate the experience of going to an escape room. In a sense, that experience was brought full circle this past Saturday night when my friends and I went to Denver Escape Room to play Nova.

Nova was purportedly being offered to the public for the first time the night we went. We were led not to a constructed room, but to a large space in the back of their building, where a series of tables were set up in an almost classroom sort of space. Each table had its own series of boxes and items (and a spread of snacks -- the only thing we were allowed to touch before the event began).

It seemed as though Nova may have been a preexisting game they've run before as a corporate team-building exercise. Five different teams (of 4 to 6 players), each at their own table, were given the same scenario -- a sudden accident has knocked our spaceship off course and damaged it. We needed to restore functions to the ship, determine our location, then reach the planet of our original mission, transport to its surface, and locate the Macguffin we were there for in the first place.

Nova was very much like an escape room in a box. But it was a big, expensive box. As you worked your way through puzzles and reported answers to the game monitors, they'd hand over still more sealed plastic tubs full of all kinds of new components. The game lasted well over an hour (and was meant to), filled with a wide variety of clever puzzles and many well-produced props fancier than any you'd actually get from a boxed board game. (Well... you could put these components in a boxed board game, but it would be a very expensive game.)

The suspicion that this was a large team-building event kind of game came from the nature of many of the puzzles. Each of the five tables had pieces of information that all other tables actually needed to reach solutions. Fully half of the puzzles had you get up from your own table and start making rounds of the room, gathering information you needed. The instructions before play were specific on this -- while you could hide your solutions to puzzles (as this was, nominally, a competition), you were required to share any background information with everyone who came by to ask.

Our group of five was working at our best that night. Everyone contributed at various points, and the game was very well designed to allow for this. There was not only a good variety of puzzles, but multiple puzzles were often delivered at the same moment, making it easy to divide the work.

At an hour and 22 minutes in, my group was the first to complete the game -- and we really had a blast with it. It certainly would have scratched my itch for an escape room, had we not already booked our tickets for The Last Defender the next day. Improbably, this event actually cost more than The Last Defender, though. Not that we felt we hadn't gotten our money's worth; Nova's breadth of puzzles and slickly produced components certainly made it an experience we enjoyed, and I'm very glad we did it. But at the same time, I could understand if it continued to be a game they only occasionally offer to the public, focusing instead on their fully-staged escape rooms.

This was a great event for junkies like us who can't get enough, but others may prefer a more conventional escape room experience rather than seeking this one out. That said, if you've never been to Denver Escape Room, it would be well worth going -- they're the best we've found in the area so far.