Disclosure: I am in no way affiliated with the makers and distributers of EXIT: The Board Game. I have not been paid by them or been given any free product.

Several of the gaming group are moving houses and I have just gotten the dressings off after surgery so this month has been light on the gaming (and posting). Despite that we managed to get some people and play EXIT: The escape room boardgame. This the third EXIT game I’ve played, and the second that one of the players had seen. Despite that relative inexperience, everyone really enjoyed themselves. I’m sharing a quick review here on the blog so that my gentle readers can get a sense of a game that I really enjoy and that I was unaware of until recently.

Note that I will not give away tips during this post. As such, there are very few pictures as many of the clues are visual in nature.

The premise of the game is just like a physical escape room – you must solve puzzles in order to get access to other puzzles with the end goal of escaping the place you are trapped. It is cooperative in nature, with everyone on the side of getting out. The puzzles are almost all logic problems or riddles. As a board game would have to be pretty terrifying to actually trap you so it uses a basic scenario in the instruction booklet. This ranges from being left behind during a tour of the pyramids when the doors mysteriously shut to be in trapped inside a house when you go to feed the neighbour’s cat.

What you find inside:

• Instruction Booklet
• Scenario booklet
• 30 answer cards
• Riddle Cards
• Help Cards
• Cipher Wheel
• Poster or additional room sheets
• Special items

When you start the game you open the scenario booklet. There will be some incomplete puzzles in the booklet, and most importantly a picture of the room you are in. In this picture is an image of the back of a riddle card. That is the riddle that starts you off. This is the one part that isn’t well explained (it’s deeper in the instructions) and could cause confusion if you had never played before.

The riddles are logic problems for the most part. Some deal with language, others with following paper folding instructions, others deal with spacial awareness (of the items you can see). They are really quite clever and when you get the solution it really is a nice rush of feeling smarter than the average bear.

Some objects in the pictures provided are keyed with a shape. That shape is an identifier to the riddles and cipher wheel. A diamond on a vase would link to a riddle card with a diamond on it. When you find the answer to the diamond riddle, you line up the answers on the cipher wheel. The answer cards are clever and use a two stage verification. You use the cipher wheel to get a solution. You then check the answer cards. If you are wrong, you will often get a sassy “no.” If you get a picture showing multiple clue objects you must pick the one that corresponds to the clue you are trying to solve (that particular vase for instance). That in turn directs you to another card where you are hopefully proven right!

If you are right you get instructions. These are normally instructions to draw some more of the riddle cards, but sometimes also tells you to hand out a special item or poster that then shows the new room you are in. The questions and riddles are fun. Having 3 or 4 people is useful as different viewpoints and problem solving methods often compliment each other. Once the first riddle is solved there are typically two clues to investgate so you can divide and conquer to some extent.

You will only play the game once. You will cut the cards or the box, etc. You will fold things, tear things and so on. This does make the game much more fun, but also means you can’t pass it to another group.

Winning

Winning the game depends on solving the problems. The faster you solve it and the fewer help cards you use, the higher you score. The game is ages 12 and up, but my group has yet to finish in less than 2.5 hours. I think we need some smart 12 year olds to show us how as we seem to be taking longer than normal (the game breaks down time to solve as less than 60, 60-90, 90-120, 120+). What do you win? Well, pride. There are no tangibles except the knowledge that you worked with others to solve the problems. Even so, it is an amazingly fun game.

What if I haven’t been to an escape room?

I played 2 of the Exit games before ever going to a real escape room. The real escape room was fun – no doubt. But it was far more expensive. The Exit games retail for about 15 CAD on Amazon. To keep 4 people entertained for 2 hours (or longer in our case) for 15 bones is a great deal, and the fun is almost equal to that of a professional escape room. Added benefit – you don’t get kicked out if you run out of time. You will be able to have the satisfaction of finishing the riddles and the game as you don’t pay by the hour.

Overall

These are really fun games with good production values. While it may seem excessive to buy a game to play it only once, splitting the cost per person means that it is cheaper than going for a coffee (and all the parts are paper and so recyclable). I recommend taking a look at these if you are having some friends over who enjoy puzzles, or if you’re looking for a good game out at the cottage.