Room Escape Artist

Murder on the Ornament Express is a tabletop escape game created by CU Adventures.

Format

Style of Play:

• Tabletop escape game

Who is it For?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers

Required Equipment: pen and paper, internet-connected device for hints

Recommended Team Size: 2-3

Play Time: 1 hour

Price: $18

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

The game consists of a packet of printed materials designed to be played on a table top.

Flakey the snowman had been melted aboard the Ornament Express. Given the train cars, a handful of evidential artifacts, and a song as our guides, we had to deduce who melted Flakey, with what, and why. We could access hints and enter our accusation on the game’s website.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

I received this game in a small red envelope – what a nice, compact package! There are not too many components and no additional equipment is required. However, internet access is needed for hints and extra paper will be useful to write down the solved answers to avoid marking up the puzzle components.

The puzzles were fair, and while the clues in the images were relatively easy to find, the postcards are tiny, and we had to utilize magnification a few times! I felt some of the written clues may be interpreted ambiguously, but I have seen some tricky writing in my puzzling career. For this game, if one doesn’t overthink the things, it will result in a smoother solve.

The hint page is easy to use, and is generally organized by location of the clues. The hints that I ended up using were helpful and made sense.

Ultimately, this game is very cute, with light seasonal wit and a surprisingly dramatic story that I enjoyed playing.

Cara Mandel’s Reaction

Murder on the Ornament Express already had me at the title alone. Thankfully, the experience was equally endearing. The folks at CU Adventures have created a charming, family-friendly who-dunnit for the holiday season with this adorable game. The artwork was festive and the clues were cleverly disguised throughout. I enjoyed the mechanisms they employed to drop hints about the weapon, motive, and culprit. Though I didn’t have the exactly correct reason sorted out, I was in the general ballpark and thankfully the website offered a list of possible motives from which to choose. Overall, I found this to be a delightful holiday game that would pair nicely with a hot cocoa and maybe some freshly baked cookies.

Sarah Mendez’s Reaction

As a puzzler with some tolerance for ambiguity, I found this to be a lovely activity for the Christmas season. For me, the game’s highlight was its cozy yet crisp artwork that both hid and revealed puzzles in clever ways. The process of finding evidence and making connections wasn’t always obvious, but every trailhead ultimately led somewhere. We did have to sit with our thoughts sometimes, but I found that to be more satisfying than frustrating. My only significant quibble came while deciphering the mystery’s timeline. The relative timing of some clues seemed ambiguous, and one illustration seemed both necessary and misleading. Regardless, this would make a fine casual gift for people with some puzzling experience, and I’m looking forward to reusing the pieces as a simple Christmas decoration next year!

David Spira’s Reaction

Murder on the Ornament Express is exactly the kind of product that we’ve come to expect from the folks at CU Adventures. It’s a funny, punny, adorable game packed with well-crafted puzzles that allowed us to explore the world’s most family-friendly murder mystery.

CU Adventures has an incredible capacity to cram more interesting gameplay into tiny packages than just about anyone, and that skillset was fully on display in Murder on the Ornament Express.

The one thing that I would love to see improved on a future printing is the clarity of a few images. A couple of objects that help tie the threads of the mystery together needed to appear sharper, and one image’s contents were only clear to us after we looked up what they were (but once we knew what it was, it was clear.)

Overall, this was a wonderful game to play with the family, and I highly recommend it.

Disclosure: CU Adventures provided the Hivemind reviewers with 1 complimentary play.