02642: Tabletop Escape Rooms


The rise in popularity of the Legacy-style game, these being games that you play for a set campaign that includes making permanent changes to the board and its components, has helped shift our paradigm when it comes to tabletop gamese. For the longest time you think of a board game in terms of its replayability as it is an experience you can repeatedly return to time and time again when you feel like playing. Legacy-style games have a limited shelf life so to speak as the set campaign lasts for only so long.

There are other games that are not quite full Legacy games but certainly present their own limited-play experience. One such example is the upcoming Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game designed by beloved game designer Ignacy Trzewiczek and Przemyslaw Rymer, it is a limited play campaign game that is being presented as a game night experience that you'll play with a particular group of friends probably once. It contains 5 different cases to solve and once you've solved all 5 cases you'll hopefully have an idea of the game's meta-plot.

One quirkier example of other limited-play games are those that aim to simulate escape rooms. Previously Tobie stumbled on a few copies of Exit: The Game and we gobbled up the first three adventures and blitzed through them with a group of friends. When compared to "traditional" board games with theoretically infinite replay value, they may seem like a waste as they can only be played once. But when you compare them to actual escape rooms, they're actually a lot more affordable.

Happily enough local game retailer Gaming Library has just announced a deal with Thames and Kosmos to bring in their games into the country including the Exit line of games. Today we avoided participating in our condo's fire drill and visited the Greenbelt 5 branch of Gaming Library to pick up the three other adventures we hadn't gotten to try yet. I can't wait to play them with friends even if it's going to be a one-shot deal for each story.

What these games provide more than a night of fun is a bit of an immersive experience and their designer's effort to tell a story using this single box of things. We also have two games from the Unlock series, which is yet another tabletop escape room style experience and we'll see how they compare to the Exit games soon enough.

The sheer diversity of possible game styles that they're trying in the tabletop community is pretty amazing and we can't help but do our best to support the industry. There's a lot of hard work going into coming up witht these games and those efforts need to be recognized and rewarded.

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