Exit, Unlock, and Deckscape compared: A guide to escape room board games
Options in the escape room board game space abound. Let's make sense of what these three popular series bring.
I’d love to start this off by talking about how I remember the first escape room I went to vividly, but I don’t know that I do. I know it was in Salt Lake City, and I think it was with friends. Or maybe it was with work. I feel like maybe I did my first two in pretty close proximity. But even if I don’t remember my first escape room vividly, I do remember the first time I played an escape room board game. Despite becoming a big trend in games in 2016, I waited until November 2019 to play my first one.
I was visiting some friends in the greater Seattle area in 2019. We’d gone to a game store in their town, and there, I picked up an Exit game. Ginny, my wife, was heading to Seattle the next day, but tonight, my friend Scott and I were going to play this game: The Abandoned Cabin, one of the first three Exit games released. The game was absolutely incredible. I marveled at the puzzles, each of which would have felt right at home in a physical escape room, if slightly reduced in physical interactions.
We attended the Northwest Chocolate Festival during that trip. Despite an exhausting day of eating bean-to-bar chocolate (which I would highly recommend, by the way), we played three more Exit games over the following three days. Scott and I didn’t play another Exit game together for two years — you get it, 2019, 2021, the intervening years — but it was just as good.
Having waited so long to play my first Exit game, I was treated to a backlog of games. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, we played through a slew of them with our friends Heather and Michael. We played them with family and friends. We eventually caught up with the series in August 2023, though we will soon be behind again. The series saw incredible changes in our lives, between births of multiple children, dogs, shifts in public health and personal health.
Before we get to a discussion about these three escape room board game series, some inside baseball: I keep a running list of ideas (if I were in marketing, it would generally be called a ‘swipe file’, but I don’t want to think about this little newsletter as a marketing platform. You get it.), some of which have been on said list for multiple years. That list tends to be a physical one; I can’t get enough of writing in a notebook with a nice pen. When I add new entries, I’ll typically go back through what I’ve put on the list, mostly to make sure I’m not going to duplicate myself too much. This piece here? This has been floating around for a long time. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these games. Does that mean I’m an expert puzzle-solver? Certainly not, though I’d love to be someday. I still get stumped and stuck. These games can be quite difficult. That’s a not-insignificant part of the appeal. Each one presents a unique challenge and a problem to be solved.
Exit: The Game
The Exit series, designed by Inka and Markus Brand, has produced some of my most reliable escape-room-in-a-box gaming — and that’s good, but it’s also produced some of my favorite gaming experiences to date. These games are among my very favorite, and while not every one of them has been a runaway success — I’m looking at you, Shadows over Middle Earth — there have been some big highlights in the 25 iterations of the game I’ve played. (25! That’s a pretty substantial number.)
Each game generally features a deck of puzzle cards that make up the bulk of the game, a deck of clue cards with which you can get gradual hints, and a decoder wheel, which will be used in finding solutions to said puzzles. The makeup of the puzzles can vary wildly through the game — each one might be visual, spatial, mathematical, physical, logical, or part of some other category that’s not springing to mind. There are things I wish I could say, but spoilers for these games would be a cruel thing indeed. Let’s just say that through those 25 different games, I’ve been surprised repeatedly. I can say (and the game makes no secret of this) that you’ll inevitably end up destroying some cards and components, which I think is just fine — but your mileage may vary.
Each game features a difficulty ranking on the box, but there remains some inevitable variation. I’ve often found that the puzzles I’m not particularly adept at solving, somebody I’m playing with can solve, or we might collaborate and work out solutions better together than either of us could separately. While some of the easier iterations are fairly straightforward, with only one puzzle being considered at a given a time, more difficult games will have multiple parallel puzzles to be solved, and the solutions might impact each other. Sometimes, you might be able to make progress on a puzzle, but you can’t solve it until you’ve progressed in a different puzzle. It’s a bit tricky, this one.
Unlock
If you’re amenable to using an app while you play, Unlock is a nice option for consideration. These games are comprised of just a deck of cards and a mobile application. You’ll look for clues on cards, which will lead you to other cards, guide you to puzzles you’ll solve in the app, and progress the story.
Unlock games, when they’re at their best, are very good experiences. I’m not a huge fan of playing through a mobile app, especially as it becomes difficult to work through multiple solving paths simultaneously, even if the design of the game supports it.
There’s a nice variety of theming available in the Unlock games, with some recognizable settings available. Would you like to solve a puzzle in an Alice in Wonderland setting? In the world of the board game Pandemic? Or maybe in a Star Wars setting? This is the series for you. (Somebody wake me up when there’s a Star Trek escape-room-in-a-box. Or a Star Trek escape room. Or … maybe these are all holodeck adventures gone wrong? Hmm.)
The Unlock series, for me, gets a nice second-place ranking, and that’s not a huge mark against it. This series has its strengths: The app does sometimes open up the types of puzzles you can be tasked with solving, and being able to share the game after completion is certainly appealing. Still, I don’t love that sometimes the game can be a bit of a “spot the number” exercise, and combining items can sometimes feel like a poorly structured adventure game.
Deckscape
This is a series I’ve only recently started exploring, but I’ve enjoyed the games I’ve played thus far. Like basically all of these, the game’s played over a series of cards. As you progress through the deck, you progress through a story, which will require you to solve puzzles and unravel mysteries. While we’re not here to judge the writing — translated works are a difficult thing to start with, and games writing is not always top-tier writing — there are times the writing feels a bit on the clunkier side. I’ve enjoyed the puzzles, but they do tend to all be constrained to a few cards. I do need to do a bit more research here, which really just means I need to play some more of these. The ones I’ve had — good! Maybe not quite great.
Choosing a series
My first recommendation is always the Exit series. I’ve had hours upon hours of fun with these. I’ve solved puzzles with friends and family collaboratively. I love that. Not every puzzle is perfect, but most are crafted with a precision that makes the games sing.
The Unlock series is app-based, and you’ll never rip up, bend, or otherwise destroy cards as you play. The puzzles are good but can tend toward ‘spot the number’.
Deckscape sometimes features weaker writing, and the puzzles are less varied than either Exit or Unlock. That said, they’re generally quite good, and the lack of an app is a benefit.
Of course, I’d recommend you try all of these if you have the resources. They each present a different take on the escape room genre, and I’ve had truly amazing times with each.
Not escape rooms, but still great
If you enjoy the format and feeling of an escape room board game, these games might be worth consideration.
Decktective takes the system found in Deckscape and, to my mind, applies it more successfully to a mystery-solving game. Each player involved in the game will be given some cards at a point in the game, which are then played as evidence or to an archive. Playing cards to the archive allows you to play higher-value cards as evidence. It’s a clever system, and I rather like it.
UNDO takes the familiar trappings of an mystery game, then applies it to time-travel: You’ll be tasked with performing some action at a specific point in time, and you will only succeed if you can navigate the time-space continuum appropriately, gathering clues and taking inductive leaps.
echoes is an interesting series — it’s another one of those pesky app-driven games, but this is a mystery-solving game where you’ll listen to audio recordings in pursuit of answers. It’s a fresh little idea.
Well, what did I miss? Which escape room games do you love? I’ve got a couple Escape the Room boxes waiting for me to crack them open, and I’m very curious about the Escape Tales series, too. Do you have any favorites?
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