Well, and I totally failed to notice it was Tabletop Day this year. I blame my local tabletop game store, who inexplicably failed to alert me to this event, despite my having explicitly told them never to contact me about sales events of any kind. I didn’t mean Tabletop Day! Sheesh.
Anyway, despite my total ignorance of it being the day to celebrate the playing of games on tabletops, our family did in fact play a game on a tabletop on that day. So that’s all right.
The particular game we played was Exit (the Game): The Secret Lab. This is one of a series of games in which the players work together to solve a series of puzzles in order to give the devil-bunny a ham or something. In this case, it’s something about a chemistry lab, I guess. Look, the flavor-text part was not the most successful part of the game, all right?
Personally, I don’t usually mind when the flavor text turns out to be transparently untethered to the game-play. I am capable of either ignoring it or playing along with the silliness. I can enjoy a game more if the setting works with the mechanics, but the utter ridiculousness of Settlers of Catan or Acquire or Splendor doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the game. So I didn’t object to the fact that once we began solving puzzles, there was no real reason to refer back to the fact that it was a laboratory or that we were trying to escape from it by… er… there was something about eating through the locks with the correct combinations of chemicals, I think? At any rate, it didn’t bother me.
I thought the bigger flaw was that the ten puzzles were (as far as I recall) completely unconnected to each other. Every puzzle solved yielded clues to other puzzles as a reward, but the solution itself was mechanical and yielded no actual information that could be used as a clue. I mean: I could imagine a set-up where you solve one puzzle to figure out what the blue stuff in the beaker is, and that the solution to that puzzle is actually the name of the blue stuff, and then another later puzzle requires you to know that name (and then manipulate the letters or something). This was more like one abstract puzzle yielding the sequence 2-8-3, which when checked against the solution book turned out to be correct, so you may look at clues R and K, which turn out to be mostly abstract clues for abstract puzzles yielding the sequence 4-2-5. You had the problem with mostly-sequential puzzles (you can’t always set aside one for a while to work on another) without the benefit. Not a terrible problem, but a flaw nonetheless.
The puzzles were largely at the right level for us: we completed the ten puzzles in 66 minutes, which was about the right amount of time for our enjoyment of the whole thing. We pulled the basic hint cards for half of them; this level of hint just confirmed that we had the right information and thus allowed us to ignore extraneous information, which was sometimes helpful. We needed the second-level hint for only one of the puzzles, in part because I was distracted by a bit of a red herring in the clue, so that’s all right. We never wound up with an answer that turned out to be wrong. The Youngest Member (who is now eleven, if you can believe that) solved one puzzle entirely by himself and made the important recognition for a second, and so felt like and indeed was a real contributor to the group. There was some mathematical/logical work, but visual thinking was necessary for some of the puzzles as well, so it seemed to me that it worked as a group endeavor where different players could provide different ideas. No puzzle required any actual knowledge of chemistry or anything else, really—there was no fill-in-the-blank with famous quotations or names or anything similar. I do think we saved time on one puzzle simply because the Perfect Non-Reader of this blog is currently taking high-school Chemistry and could find elements on the Periodic Table much much faster than I could. But without that, we would have found them eventually.
That does bring me to my main complaint about the design of the game: everything was tiny. The cards with the clues were (I think) bridge-sized rather than poker-sized, and even at poker-sized the Periodic Table would have required a magnifier for me to comfortably read. Other info was not quite that tiny, but there was no effective way to share a clue with everyone around the table. Some puzzles required manipulating a couple of small pieces of paper, which (a) is actually a problem for some people, although I could hope that every group will have at least one person whose fingers are capable, and (2) can’t even be seen by anyone else, so that there’s little sense of achievement around the board when the puzzle is solved. In fact, the whole sense of communal achievement at solving a puzzle would, I feel, have been much greater if the everything been much larger and in much bigger type. Of course, that would have pushed the cost of the game to publish up, and thus the price of the game to purchase would have almost certainly been higher than our price point. So I understand. Still.
MFQ: We had a lot of fun with this one. I think the best group for it would probably be people like my household: fond of puzzles but not expert puzzlers. I suspect I know people who would solve the whole thing in fifteen minutes, and others who would have a miserable fifteen minutes solving nothing and (I hope) leave off to go play something else. But I would think there are an awful lot of people in that sweet spot. We had four solvers; the box says one-to-six, but I would recommend it for three-to-five. I suspect that in a group of six, at least one person would feel left out, and while it could be solved with two, at that point just sit next to each other with an ordinary puzzle book, right? I also advise using the first-level hint cards whenever even briefly stuck; getting a higher “score” at the end of the game is less fun than moving forward with puzzles.
Finally, I’ll make the point that this is a single-use game, as in order to solve it you need to write on, fold or cut some of the pieces. That was a little awkward during game play, since actually cutting up the rule book or drawing on the cards feels wrong, and now we have a bunch of useless cards to throw away, which seems wasteful. It’s not that I feel ripped off; the cost of the game seemed more or less commensurate with the enjoyment, somewhere between going out to a movie and watching one on-line.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.