I played EXIT: Abandoned Cabin with a group of friends yesterday. I warned them of my experiences that I described in my last few blog posts, but they were willing to accept the challenge. We finished in one hour five minutes and used no hint cards, which gave us a final score of nine stars. It's the…
Forgotten Island was a different experience than my last EXIT game. I solved it in three minutes. Let me back up a second before I explain that: After my previous blog post, the responses of my friends on Facebook suggested that they too were no longer enthusiastic about playing any more EXIT games. I had spare time…
I'm stuck at home for a while, so I decided to tackle an EXIT game solo: Polar Station. It took me 3 hours and 15 minutes, and I used 6 hint cards, which gave me a score of two stars. This is the lowest score I've seen in any EXIT game I've played so far. Even though…
This is a follow-up to my previous post. Last night I played EXIT: The Forbidden Castle with a different group of friends than the ones from last week's puzzle game. Notes: The game seriously handed us our butts. It took us two hours and forty minutes to solve it. We used several hint cards, though only three…
Please don't buy any of the Thames & Kosmos EXIT games... so I can play them with you! I purchased my first EXIT game because the series had won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2017. These are "escape room" games: Your character is trapped, and can only escape by solving a…
It just occurred to me: In the past year, among my Wiccan friends, a couple moved to North Carolina, another friend moved to South Carolina, another is moving to Texas. Among my gaming friends, one has moved to Philadelphia. Another is moving to Seattle. A couple are moving to Minnesota. It's my deodorant, isn't it?
I've written video-game reviews from time to time, but this is the first one for which I'm giving a trigger warning: discussion of severe mental health issues. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an unusual video game in that the lead character is psychotic. I'm not using the term in its popular (and incorrect) sense of meaning "psychopath." Senua…
A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to be the gamesmaster at a game of Paranoia. I want to tell a story about that game. Let me set up the situation:
One of my favorite board games is Betrayal on House on the Hill. It’s a semi-cooperative board game. The game has two phases. In the first phase, the players work together in exploring an old house. After a random event occurs, the game shifts into its second phase: One players’ character is randomly chosen to be a traitor. The traitor works to kill off the other players’ characters, while the other players work together to escape that fate.