Room Escape Artist

We had an amazing conversation with Donald Dennis of the On Board Games Podcast. This was a substantial, challenging, and interesting discussion about what makes for a great tabletop puzzle game experience, some of the negative trends we’re seeing, and where we hope the genre is going.

OBG 333: Hint System and Bottlenecking

Timestamps & Relevant Links

At 1 hour 40 minutes in length, it’s a long conversation. We broke out and timestamped the conversation so that you can zero in on the topics that interest you most.

The meatiest parts of the conversation are bolded.

0:00 – Introductions

3:10 – Escape room tours & how we go about constructing them

5:20 – About Room Escape Artist & how we approach reviews

7:41 – What tabletop games have we been playing lately? Pandemic Season 1, Exit: The Game – Sinister Manor (review to come), Unlock: The Tonipal’s Treasure, Journal29 & its sequel Journal29 Revelation (review to come, eventually), and Librarians Almanac (review not yet published).

13:50 – What has Donald been playing? Fortune, Ticket To Ride: Nordic Countries, Key Forge

19:00 – Our desire to play games that are easy to pick up without learning tons of rules

20:00 – How many escape rooms we’ve played, how we fund this, our new Patreon, how we operate, and what we want to transform REA into

25:45 – 11 Principles of Tabletop Escape Game Design

28:00 – The rise and fall of Choose Your Own Adventure books and what they mean for tabletop escape games

30:40 – Our favorite easily purchasable tabletop escape game

33:00 – Our favorite more niche tabletop escape game

36:00 – Detailed discussion on the Unlock, Exit, ThinkFun, and Tale of Ord games

57:00 – Tabletop games & expectation-setting

1:00:00 – Detailed discussion of subscription games (Escape The Crate, Cypher House, Dispatch, Hunt A Killer, Mysterious Package Company, Finders Seekers, Lock Paper Scissors)

1:19:00 – Some of the stranger puzzle games we’ve found (Prototype HARP, printable Thingiverse Room Escape, Cryptogram Puzzle Post, and Enigma Emporium)

1:25:00 – Board games with a puzzley or mystery component (Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Tales of the Mythos, Detective: The Modern Crime Boardgame)

1:27:30 – We answer an assortment of questions from Twitter & Boardgame Geek… and we showed some love to Time Stories, Deckscape, and Escape Tales

1:38:30 – David makes a definitive statement regarding the character of Han Solo.