You find the corresponding numbered cards in the deck and lay them out, building the space up as you explore it. You start with a room card that establishes the theme (there’s everything from dusty temples to cartoon circuses on offer) but, more importantly, is littered with numbers and letters.
Each set consists of a single deck, with numbers on the back and bright illustrations on the front. The magic of Unlock! is the way it manages to conjure an escape room right there on your dining table, with nothing but rectangles of card and the occasional input on your phone or tablet using its companion app.
FREE PUZZLE ESCAPE GAMES SERIES
The perfect entry point - or should that be exit point? The Unlock! series of escape room games sees players use a combination of cards and a free companion app to solve puzzles. Think of us as the voice that gives hints over the intercom when you’re stuck and points you towards that one vital thing you’d somehow missed the whole time - in this case, being the right escape room board game for you. Which is where this list of the best escape room board games out there comes in. And they’re all good at slightly different things. They’re all roughly an hour long, and have you and anywhere from one to seven companions solving puzzles, but some do that entirely using a deck of cards, while others involve a companion app or website or physical components. As with the real thing, there’s a remarkable amount of variety between them. There are numerous escape room board game series out there, each offering multiple ‘rooms’ that use their particular ruleset. There are plenty of escape room games out there that’ll let you escape a room inside your own home, without having to ask someone to lock the door from outside and wedge a chair under the handle. If any of that sounds familiar, well, you’re in luck. After first emerging from the darkness sometime in the early 2000s, escape rooms have spent the past decade pushing through cracks in high streets the world over and blossoming – at last count, there were over 1,500 escape rooms in the UK alone according to Exit Games.Īctually visiting an escape room in person isn’t always an option, though, whether because of a lack of local escape rooms, because everyone is too busy "working", or because they’re fully booked.
There’s a unique pleasure to escape rooms - and it’s one that, by this point, pretty much everyone is familiar with. Frantically jiggling the dials of a padlock looking for that one magic combination.
Tugging strings to try and unhook an out-of-reach key. We’ve all been there: trapped in a small, slightly dingy room, systemically lifting any item that’s not nailed down and peering underneath in hopes of discovering a code.