Deckscape Clause

There are a lot of board game series out there aiming to capture the experience of an escape room on your own gaming table. Even though they're all inspired by the same "source material," there's a surprising amount of innovation in the genre, with different franchises using different mechanics. Recently, I tried another system for the first time when I played Deckscape: The Mystery of Eldorado.

The angle taken by the Deckscape series is "you don't need anything but this deck of cards." Where other escape room games include booklets with elaborate illustrations, crafted components to give you actual puzzles to hold in your hands, or smart phone apps you must use to enter solutions, Deckscape strips away all the bells and whistles. It's just you, your friends, and a deck of cards.

There is a marginal, theoretical advantage in this. You could play it literally anywhere, even without a smart phone or internet access. There's a thematic purity to it: where other escape room games may be trying to recreate the actual escape room experience as faithfully as they can, this game has thrown the switch as far toward "traditional board game" as might be possible.

But I think Deckscape lost more than it gained with this approach. Because there's no "decoder wheel" or book or app you use to check your answers, you get exactly one chance to solve every puzzle. Players must agree on a solution, then flip a card over to the back and see if what they've described is what the card explains. If you're wrong, you're wrong, and you take a penalty. But you don't have a chance to try again and get it right, because you've now seen the answer. There's no tentative exploration like you often experience in an escape room, none of the "what if I tried these numbers in this combination lock" or "what if this random object I found in this drawer goes with this somehow?"

The game's hint system lacks incrementalism too. Most escape room board games find a way to give you multiple hints to a puzzle, each gradually more revealing, before giving you the solution. Deckscape puts a couple of hint cards into the mix, each with a single clue to a share of the game's puzzles. If you go for the help, you're pretty much given the answer, which is quite unsatisfying. (And in this particular Deckscape product -- small spoiler here -- one of the "solutions" to one of the puzzles is to look at the answer. Lame.)

The game does tell a rather elaborate story of being stranded in the jungle looking for treasure. The scope of it is nice, and many of the illustrations are fun. But the story is also a bit disjointed in how you can encounter it. As you work your way through the deck of cards, you're asked to lift off groups of cards and set them aside to mark "forks in the road" of the story. Within each pile, a story is being told in sequence. But the game isn't really presenting you choices, and you must eventually work your way through all the piles you create along the way. Going back to an earlier pile after experiencing the story of a later pile often creates a rather illogical story flow.

Some of the puzzles are pretty good -- and you could well argue that this is where you want this kind of game to be best anyway. Still, I'd say that based on this one Deckscape game, this is my least favorite of the escape room board games I've tried. I give The Mystery of Eldorado a C.