I’ve always had a soft spot for puzzle games. From Tetris to those logic puzzles you find in the Penny Press game books, to word games and Sudoku puzzles. I love the moment when I sit down in front of one, utterly clueless, then start teasing at the edges, working the system to slowly unravel the answer.
That’s the feeling I had the first time I encountered Turing Machine, designed by Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet, with art by Sébastien Bizos and published by Scorpion Masqué in 2022. Turing Machine is a deduction puzzle for one to four players where the goal is to determine a secret three-number code. In theory, it sounds simple enough: Each number has a colour (blue, yellow, and purple), and each one is between one and five. You’re just trying to deduce the correct combination. But the way the game gets you there is what makes it fascinating.
In the centre of the table are a number of “verifiers,” small logical rules that help guide you toward the solution. Each verifier has a large confirmation card associated with it, and these confirmation cards combined with the punch board numbers act like a kind of cardboard computer. During a round, each player chooses a potential code consisting of three numbers between one and five, one number for blue, one for yellow, and one for purple. You take the punch cards corresponding to those numbers and stack them together, lining them up so that all the cut-out holes overlap. Once the cards are stacked, only a single square remains visible. You then take that assembled code and test it against one of the verifiers by placing the large confirmation card underneath. It will reveal either a check mark or an X, telling you whether your code satisfies the condition being tested or not. It’s a simple action mechanically, but the first time you a little green check mark, it’s a little startling, like watching a mechanical calculator click and clack to arrive at the right answer.
There are a lot of these logical verifiers in the box, forty-eight in total, but you only use four to six of them in any given puzzle. Each verifier tests a different logical condition, and collectively they provide all the information you need to narrow down the possible solutions. One example, a verifier might test the value of the yellow number in relation to three. In that case, the rule could be one of three possibilities: the yellow number is less than three, the yellow number is equal to three, or the yellow number is greater than three. If you test a code where yellow is one and the verifier returns a check mark, then you immediately know that the verifier rule must be “yellow is less than three.” It doesn’t tell you the exact number, you still don’t know whether yellow is one or two, but it eliminates several possibilities for the yellow number at once. The puzzle, then, becomes a process of gathering small pieces of information from multiple verifiers and slowly collating them until the three-number code reveals itself.
What makes Turing Machine particularly impressive is the sheer scale of what it’s capable of generating. The game’s website boasts over seven million possible puzzles, and you can go there at any time to generate a daily challenge or create puzzles of varying difficulty. The site will simply give you the verifiers you need and the corresponding answer cards, and from there you can assemble the puzzle on your table and start deducing. Easy puzzles might use four verifiers, while harder ones ramp up to five or six, each additional rule adding another layer of complexity to untangle or another step in the logic you’ll need to take to deduce the correct 3 numbers. It’s a clever system that keeps the game feeling fresh long after you’ve understood its basic structure.
I really have to say how much I appreciate the math and artistry that went into designing this thing. The fact that this little stack of punch cards and a set of cardboard verification strips can function like a logical computer boggles my mind a little. You lay these punch cards on top of each other, isolating a single square, and somehow that physical arrangement accurately reflects the numbers you’re testing against the rule. It’s the kind of design that feels elegant in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. There’s no denying how brilliance it is, and every time I hold an answer card up to my stack of punch cards, I find myself admiring how such a simple set of components can produce such a robust deduction system.
Where the experience starts to lose me, though, is in how the game handles multiplayer. On paper, Turing Machine supports up to four players, but the structure of the game makes that feel a little misleading. In each round, every player selects their own three-number code and can test it against up to three verifiers. After that, everyone gives either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Thumbs down if you want to keep gathering information, thumbs up if you believe you’ve solved the code. If everyone gives a thumbs down, the game simply continues into another round where all players test new codes. When one or more players signal that they think they’ve solved it, they can attempt to validate their answer against the solution. If they’re correct, they win; if they’re wrong, they’re eliminated from the game. If multiple players solve it in the same round, the winner is whoever asked the fewest verification questions in total.
Mechanically it works fine, but the effect is that the game feels extremely solitary. Yes, technically you’re racing the other players to reach the answer first, but the reality is that everyone is just solving their own puzzle in parallel. What your opponents do doesn’t really give you any additional information, and there’s no meaningful way to interact with their deductions or build on their discoveries. You’re not debating theories, you’re not negotiating clues, and you’re not influencing each other’s decisions in any meaningful way. At the table it ends up feeling less like a shared experience and more like several people sitting beside each other working through separate logic puzzles. At that point it almost feels like you might as well be doing Sudoku puzzle side by side and just comparing how long it took for each of you to finish.
None of this changes the fact that I genuinely admire what Turing Machine accomplishes as a design. As a solo puzzle, it’s pretty cool. There’s something really calm and satisfying about sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning and working through one of its logical challenges, kind of like my mom used to do with her Penny Press puzzle books. The system and production itself is clever enough that the act of solving the puzzle becomes its own reward. It’s satisfying to look at all the verifiers and puzzle out the most efficient way to whittle down the potential options. The only practical drawback to Turing Machine is the physical setup. Pulling out the correct confirmation cards from a large stack, arranging six verifiers, and then carefully putting everything back in order afterward can feel a little tedious, especially if you’re planning to play multiple puzzles in a row. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it does add a small amount of friction to what is otherwise a very clean experience.
If you happen to be a premium subscriber to Board Game Arena, Turing Machine is available there in digital form. In that environment the game shines a little brighter, simply because all of that setup and sorting disappears. The system runs smoothly, the puzzles generate instantly, and you can focus entirely on the logic of the challenge rather than the logistics of the components. But in that case the magical moment of assembling the punch cards and having it reveal the answers is lost.
For me personally, though, I don’t see Turing Machine returning to my physical table very often. As a multiplayer experience it doesn’t give me the sense of interaction or shared triumph that I’m usually looking for when I sit down to play with friends. And while I appreciate the elegance of the puzzle, and the brilliance of the production, I’m not particularly drawn to playing it solo either with its tedious set up. What I’m left with, then, is a strong admiration for the wit and craftsmanship behind the design. It’s an incredibly cool system, one that manages to simulate a logical computer using nothing more than punched-out cardboard and a handful of clever rules, and perhaps a game I’ll spin up in my web browser while I’m eating my lunch. Even if Turing Machine is not a game I’ll reach for regularly, I can’t help but marvel what the designers managed to achieve with some piles of card stock.
The longer I’ve been into board gaming, the more I’ve noticed a steady drift toward hybridization. Mechanisms get smashed together, so now a game isn’t just a deck-builder game or a worker placement game, but some intricate fusion of both, a la Lost Ruins of Arnak or Dune: Imperium. And while I genuinely enjoy seeing the interesting ways games meld mechanics, there’s something refreshing about a game that picks a single idea and simply executes it as cleanly and completely as possible. So with that in mind, let’s talk about 1997’s For Sale, designed by Stefan Dorra.
For Sale is basically 2 auction games in one. Your performance in the first auction game directly sets you up for the second one, which is the half of the game that’s actually worth points. In the first half of For Sale, players are bidding on properties represented by cards numbered from 1 to 30, with each number reflecting not just value but a property with personality. The 1 is a broken cardboard box, getting soggy in the street while the 30 is a literal space station. Everyone starts with the same pool of money, and each round a number of properties equal to the player count is revealed. From there, players take turns bidding to stay in the round, raising the amount of cash incrementally or dropping out entirely, at which point they take the lowest valued property still available. If the bidding has looped around the table, then the player who passed forfeits half their bid to the supply in return for the lowest property card available. Only the final remaining player in a round surrenders all their cash and takes the final and highest property for himself. It’s a system that’s easy to explain, but it quickly shows that it’s holding a surprising amount of tension once you’re in it.
That tension comes from the constant push and pull between risk and reward. If a spread of cards includes one terrible property and several excellent ones, the bidding naturally escalates as players try to avoid being the one stuck with the worst option. But the moment someone chooses to drops out, it often triggers a chain reaction, as everyone reassesses the value of staying in versus cutting their losses. That rule about keeping half your money if you bow out is so clever. It creates a question in the players heads, maybe they’re bidding a bit high with the expectation that someone will bid over them, and by the time the round comes back to them, the current lowest card will be gone. Not every bid is going to make it to the final result, but it creates a dance of wills. A game of chicken where players are constantly reevaluating how much they’re willing to risk and how much they’ll drop to take the lowest card at the table.
Once all the properties have been claimed, the game shifts into its second phase, and this is where For Sale reveals its second auction type. Any excess money you have is put aside, and the properties you bought are now what you’ll use to bid with. Just like the first half, a number of cards equal to the number of players is revealed, but this time the cards represent sale values. Instead of a bidding system that goes around the table, with the value slowly swelling, now it’s a simultaneous bind bid. Everyone puts one card face down and simultaneously reveal. The highest number property takes the highest value sale price, and so on down the line. Suddenly all the decisions you made in the first half come back to haunt you. Who thought it would be a good idea to have the 16, 17, and 18? Why is your highest card a 23? Your pragmatic nature has left you with a string of low value houses and a pocket full of change.
What I find particularly compelling here is how differently the two phases feel, despite being so tightly connected. The first is open, conversational, and reactive. You can smack talk your opponents and change your mind halfway through a bidding phase. The second half is quiet and psychological, all the tension is built around hidden information and the simultaneous reveal. You’re not just evaluating the raw value of your cards, you’re considering their value in relation to your opponents. If you can correctly read your opponents, and snake a high value sale for one of your weaker cards, you’ll be in a great position. Or, if you’re like me, you’ll constantly play a card that’s a single digit below your opponents, costing you 5 or 6 thousand dollars in final score.
For Sale is not a game I would ever claim to be particularly good at. Valuing properties, both in terms of how much to spend in the first half and when to deploy them in the second, is a skill that feels just out of reach for me. I can see the logic, I can follow the flow of the game, but there’s an intuition at play that I just haven’t quite developed.
There are some things that become more noticeable the more you play. Turn order, particularly in the first phase, can have a huge impact on how a round unfolds for a particular player. The player who wins an auction becomes the starting player for the next round, which creates a shifting dynamic where position can be either an advantage or a liability depending on the cards in play. Being the first to drop out of an auction will often trigger that cascade of passing players, but being stuck at the end of the turn order can mean facing a heavily inflated bid with little room to manoeuvre. You’re sometimes left choosing between overpaying for something mediocre or settling for the worst option available, neither of which feels particularly satisfying.
That interplay between luck and planning is always present. The distribution of cards, the order in which they appear, and your position relative to other players all shape the decisions you’re able to make. It’s not something you can fully control, and while the game is short enough that this randomness rarely overstays its welcome, it does mean that some rounds feel more dictated than directed. The key, as with many auction games, is learning how to navigate those moments, how to affect what you can and minimize your losses and capitalize on the opportunities your opponents let slip through their fingers.
Where For Sale really shines is in showing how much it can accomplish with so little. It’s fast, it’s easy to teach, and it consistently generates meaningful decisions. The dual-auction structure gives it a satisfying arc, turning what could have been a single-note experience into something with interesting texture and variation. Even when For Sale frustrates, it does so in a way that invites another play, another attempt to better understand its rhythms.
Sometimes, when you’ve been inundated with new and complex games, it feels refreshing to pull out a game from almost 30 years ago and revel in its simplicity. For Sale is a game that has stood the test of time, and sits among the greatest auction games out there. It gives you the same satisfying feelings from its auction mechanics that much larger and longer games struggle to provide. It’s the perfect game to keep in your bag and pull out anywhere you have a few friends and a few minutes to spare.
At this point, there are a lot of trick taking games in the world. It’s kind of comforting to pick up a new one, and already know most of the rules. “This is a trick taking game, but here’s the twist…” and then bam, you’re off to the races. Maybe you’re trying to avoid taking the prince suit in Rebel Princess, or there’s a whole flowchart of special characters that beat one another in Skull King. Either way, trick taking games can be counted on to be taught extremely quickly, which means you’ll go from opening the rulebook to actually playing the game in mere moments.
That familiarity is part of the genre’s appeal. Trick-taking games feel communal in a way few other mechanisms do. Everyone comes to the table with a shared vocabulary: follow suit, trump, void, lead. Because of that, designers can afford to get weird. They can bend expectations, twist assumptions, and trust that players will roll with it rather than get lost in the weeds. When a trick-taking game introduces a new hook, it often lands immediately because the foundation is already there.
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, designed by Muneyuki Yokouchi and published by Bezier Games, is a trick-taking game where none of the cards have a suit until they’re “observed,” or played. Every card is black and white, so players must declare the card’s suit when it’s played. That single idea alone feels clever, but the real trick is that there are five of each card value in the deck, but only four suits in the game. So you really need to hope that no one is going to play the red 4 when you were counting on your 4 to be red, as that might just force you into a nasty paradox.
That tension between possibility and inevitability is where Cat in the Box really lives. At the start of a hand, everything feels wide open. Your cards could be anything, heck, they are everything. But as suits get claimed and the shared board fills up, the future begins to harden in uncomfortable ways. What felt like flexibility suddenly becomes constraint. You’re not just playing your hand anymore, you’re trying to weave in-between your opponents cards, trying to sneak in one last play before the proverbial door slams shut.
A paradox occurs when none of the cards in a player’s hand can legally be played. Thankfully there’s a dual layer board that you put your own coloured token onto whoever you play, a card that tracks all the cards that have been played so far. Also, having tokens connect on that board are what earn you points at the end of a round. I find the board that tracks the cards that have been played to be the most helpful thing. Granted, this would be a very difficult game to play without it, but as someone who struggles to remember which cards have already been played, I really appreciate its existence, to the point where I wish every trick taking game I play would have one.
And that board is not just functional, but it actively shapes how you think and visualize the game. Instead of relying entirely on memory, you’re constantly scanning the board, reading the patterns, and watching where other players are committing themselves. The board turns the abstract concept of “what numbers and suits are left” into a tangible and spatial arena. You can see the risk accumulating, sometimes literally clustering on one half of the board.
The concept of declaring your suit is one that’s tough to wrap your brain around in theory, but once you have the cards in your hand, and you start playing, it’s surprisingly natural. The trick really comes in knowing when to call yourself void in a suit to play the red trump suit, and how to maintain your own strategic tempo going forward. Sometimes a gambit pays off, sometimes the other colours fill up much faster than you were expecting, and before you know it, the only cards you have left have to be blue, and you told everyone you were out of blue 3 turns ago.
Those moments are equal parts satisfying and horrifying. When a plan comes together, it feels brilliant. When it collapses, it’s usually because of a decision you made much earlier, when the consequences weren’t yet obvious. Cat in the Box is very good at making you feel responsible for your own downfall. In other games I’d blame the bad hand of cards I was dealt, but here, I have no one to blame but myself.
Players earn points in 2 ways. Firstly, you earn one point per trick that you’ve won. Easy, straightforward. Unless you caused the paradox, then it’s -1 point for every trick you won. Whoops! The other way to earn points is via token adjacency on the main board. At the start of each round, after looking at your cards, you need to bid on the number of tricks you think you’re going to win. If you’re successful in your bid, you earn one point for every token in the largest group of adjacently connected tokens. Earning that you get to score those bonus points from token adjacency scoring is a huge benefit, and properly maximizing those points can easily swing the game on its own. What I like here is how the bidding doesn’t feel bolted on. It integrates naturally with the spatial puzzle on the board and gives players a clear incentive to take risks.
Making your bid and scoring your adjacent tokens can be a real boon, but it can be really tricky to accomplish, as the round ends immediately when someone triggers the paradox. This can be supremely frustrating for the other players too. If you managed to collect your tokens all together, but someone causes a paradox one turn before you’re able to win the last trick needed to satisfy your bid. It creates an exciting moment of tension. Speaking of tension, each hand has a really great arc, as cards get played, the options available to you quickly diminish. When everyone is holding only two or three cards left, it feels like a standoff. Whose going to be the one to fail, is the person who goes right before you going to take the last 3 spot?
Cat in the Box is a fantastic subversion of the trick taking mechanism that gets players excited. It’s novel, interesting, and strategic, which each play leaving you thinking about how you could have done better. The production by Bezier games is no slouch either. The dual layered board keeps all the tokens in the right spots, the player tokens themselves are brightly coloured, translucent, and screen printed to showcase a different science-y thing, which just makes this production extra charming.
The novel subversion of the trick taking mechanism is the most interesting part of Cat in the Box, which means players who don’t have a lot of experience with trick taking games won’t appreciate the whimsy the game is presenting. It’s for this reason that I wouldn’t recommend breaking it out amongst trick taking newbies. But for the groups that have a few different trick taking games under their belts, then Cat in the Box is a delightfully fun surprise.
Disclaimer: A copy of Frosted Blooms was sent to me for review
I have always loved polyomino based games. From Tetris as a young teenager to Patchwork being one of the games that made me fall in love with the board game hobby. So anytime a new polyomino game hits my table, I’m generally predisposed to enjoy myself.
Frosted Blooms is a pentomino (or 5-omino) tile laying game, designed by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc with art by Simon-Pierre Bernard, and was published by Synapses Games in 2026. In Frosted Blooms, each player is building a tulip field by picking one of the pentomino tiles from the market, placing it into their personal tableau, and then playing a card to dictate which element on the tile they just placed will score that round. Taking things a step further, if you manage to create holes in your field, you get to place improvements, chunky wooden meeples that may give you a coin, and will give you big points when the end game rolls around.
The structure of the game is straightforward. Each turn begins with you picking a tile from one of the 5 tiles around the main board. You can always just take the next tile in the sequence for free, but you can always optionally use a coin to leap frog over a tile. The reason why you might want to do that is because each tile has 4 scoring elements on it. At least 2 of the squares are blue water spaces. The other three spaces on the pentomino are flowers. Every tile depicts all 3 colours, and the number of bulbs on each tiles always equals 6. But sometimes you really want to increase the number of purple bulbs in an area, and perhaps the next tile in sequence only has a single purple bulb on it. No tile is objectively better than any other tile, each piece’s power lies in the situation you happen to find yourself in.
After placing a tile in your tableau, you must play one of your scoring cards. You’ll have 3 in your hand at any given time, and each scoring card will either score two different elements for 1 points each, or a single element for 2 points a pop. So sliding in a 3 purple tulip tile into a field adjacent to 8 other purple tulips, as you play your 2 points per purple tulip card is a real sweet deal.
Adding another layer to the story here is the empty spaces between the tiles. A single 1×1 square will earn you a worker, which also nets you a coin (sidebar, what kind of farm gets income from their workers?). Having larger empty spaces can net you the 10 point barns, while a 2×2 square will let you place a yellow windmill, worth 25 points at the end of the game.
Frosted Blooms constantly pulls you in two directions. You want to cluster your tulips into massive scoring groups, but you also want to leave awkward gaps to build high-value improvements. Every good move towards one of those goals feels like it’s happening at the expence of the other. But when you can get them to sync up, oh, the elation you feel.
Adding another layer to your decision-making is the victory point market. At the start of the game you’ll lay out a number of objectives based on the player count. These objectives will task you with collecting a certain number of objectives, or scoring a larger number of tulip bulbs of a specific colour. Whenever you achieve one of those objectives, you’re free to take it. But the catch is that you can only have one objective of each type. So do you want to lock down your bonus points early? Or do you risk pushing on to get the higher value objectives, with the chance that one of your opponents will swoop in and steal it from right under your nose?
All of these systems intertwine in a way that keeps your decisions feeling meaningful without being overwhelming. You’re constantly weighing tile selection, placement, scoring opportunities, and future potential, but it all flows naturally from the core loop. It’s the kind of design where each choice feels small in isolation, but collectively builds into something satisfying.
And then there’s the production. It’s hard not to linger on it, because Frosted Blooms is a beautiful game. The tiles are beautifully illustrated, and the tulips on the tiles have gold foiling along the edges of their petals, catching the light in a way that makes every placement feel a little special. As your tableau grows, it starts to sparkle in the light. Adding to that glitter are the really chunky wooden improvements that add a satisfying height element to the table presence. It’s not the kind of game that will stop someone in their tracks in a convention hall, but it is the kind of beautiful production that each person sitting at the table will appreciate.
I can’t decide if the length of the game is a boon or a problem. Frosted Blooms lasts a mere 10 rounds, meaning you don’t have much time to pivot should things not go your way. Perhaps you draw all your purple bloom cards at the start of the game, and then you’re given a bunch of purple heavy tiles late in the game. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. At 2 players, it took us 20 minutes to play a full game, which is great. But also I was having fun building windmills, and I was sad that I couldn’t eke out a 3rd one before the game came to a sudden end.
I also found it really hard to fight against my natural tendency to place tiles in as close combination as possible. My dozens of plays of Barenpark really set me up for failure here. I’ve trained myself to pack tiles as tightly as possible, to hate empty space entirely, and Frosted Blooms actively punishes that instinct.
But also focusing too much on nailing those improvements will make each of your scoring cards feel anemic. There’s a trade-off to be had, and part of the fun of each game is deciding on which of those scoring objectives you want to chase. The opportunities to score contrast each other in a way that makes Frosted Blooms satisfying in a way that not many tile laying games are. There’s enough grit in the system to satisfy enthusiast gamers, while the flow and attractive pieces, coupled witt the short play time will entice more casual gamers to stick around.
Frosted Blooms is a thoughtful, satisfying tile laying puzzle wrapped in a genuinely lovely presentation. It balances tactical scoring with longer-term planning, rewards careful placement and finds interesting ways to make both filled and empty spaces matter. The twist of making the empty spaces matter combined with a lavish production elevates Frosted Blooms into a game that is sure to delight whoever sits at the table to play.
Disclaimer: A prototype of Escape Comics: The Alien Ship was provided for review purposes.
Exit games started hitting the market in 2016, and by 2017, it felt like they were everywhere, and since then I’ve only played 2 (Lord of the Rings, and The Enchanted Forest). I’ve done a handful of local Escape Rooms, and while I’ve enjoyed them, I would by no means ever call myself an expert. The Exit games I’ve played have been fun, but I always felt like the narrative was paper-thin and served as an excuse to move from puzzle to puzzle. Which is why when Evan Duxbury reached out and introduced me to Escape Comics: The Alien Ship, the promise of an escape room in a comic with a narrative focus really caught my attention.
Escape Comics: The Alien Ship is an escape room in a box, but the narrative exists in a comic book. Set from a first-person perspective, you’re in a spaceship and are suddenly awoken from chryosleep by your two teammates. The first order of business is to free your wrists from the shackles, and are prompted to open the first envelope. Lo and behold, the purple and green shackles from the comic book spill out onto your table, along with a dozen picks. It’s a surprisingly immersive experience when artifacts straight from the page are in your hands.
From there, the comic narrative takes you through a daring escape through an alien spaceship, with appropriately themed puzzles to complete. It may sound like a small thing, but Escape Comics did a really great job of making all the puzzle make sense for the story. You aren’t doing puzzles for the sake of doing puzzles, but they feel tied to the theme, which again, keeps you immersed in the game.
There isn’t a crazy amount of story, just two or three comic book pages between every puzzle. The story gives context to the puzzles and a consistent narrative through line for the experience. That being said, there are only 27 pages to the comic book, it’s not a grand epic, or a masterclass in science fiction story telling. There’s not much time to establish the characters, setting, stakes, and ambitions of every character. But Escape Comics offers a more coherent story than any of the other escape rooms in a box have offered that I’ve experienced. The art is decent, something that wouldn’t look out of place if it was sitting on the shelf at my local comic book store, either. With all the chiselled jawlines, bulging muscles in skin-tight suits, not to mention the viscera of exploding formics.
Each of the puzzles is contained in a string-tie envelope, and the puzzles themselves generally aren’t too difficult, nor do they require crazy leaps of logic. Once or twice, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I just couldn’t figure out how to manipulate the components. Or I was squinting and twisting my head to figure out exactly which symbol was being depicted. As I progressed through the story, the puzzles did get harder, giving me a bit of a sense of progression, which I enjoyed. The puzzles were fairly varied, from pattern recognition, to prop manipulation, to a funky jigsaw with a hidden message. Each one was different from the previous, making the discovery of each puzzle just a little bit exciting. Furthermore, none of the puzzles require you to destroy any components, allowing for players to reset the experience and hand the box off to a friend, which I very much appreciate.
Like many of the escape rooms in a box, there’s a three wheel dial where you can punch in your answers to reveal numbers. You pull the number from a deck of cards to see if your answer was correct, or wrong. There’s a decent clue system as well, where each puzzle has a few clues to gently lead you towards the solution, before giving you the answer outright on the solution card.
Instead of a win/loss condition, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship features a point system, where each time you need a hint or get an answer wrong, you deduct a number of points, and at the end of the experience, you just have a high score to brag about. The box also says for 1 – 4 players, but like most escape room in a box games, I don’t necessarily think that these experiences accommodate that many players. Particularly here, as some puzzles and clues are spread throughout the comic book pages, and it would be easy to miss if one person was reading the words out to the table. I know I get a little frustrated when someone else is trying to work out a mechanical puzzle, and I’m just sitting there, watching them, waiting for them to give him so I can have my turn to play with the toy. It’s for that reason that I’d suggest keeping it to 2 or less players. But if you’ve done an escape room in a box before, you’d already know this.
In the end, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship succeeds in the exact area where most escape room in a box games lose me: it makes the experience feel cohesive. The puzzles aren’t just obstacles to clear, they feel like actions taken within a story. Physically pulling props from envelopes that you’ve just seen illustrated on the page creates a small but meaningful bit of magic, one that keeps you immersed in the fiction rather than reminding you that you’re just solving disconnected brainteasers at your dining room table.
It’s not a sweeping sci-fi epic, and the puzzles won’t leave seasoned escape room veterans stumped for hours. But it delivers a tightly paced, thoughtfully integrated experience with enough variety and progression to stay engaging throughout. Add in the fact that nothing is destroyed, and the entire box can be reset and shared, and it becomes an easy recommendation for fans of the genre.
If you’ve ever wished your escape room in a box had just a little more narrative weight holding it together, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship might be exactly what you’re looking for. I’m genuinely curious to see where Douglas Beech and Evan Duxbury take the concept next, because this feels less like a one-off experiment and more like the start of a series with real potential.
I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to people reviewing games that they haven’t been fully played. Not 100% completed, like, collect every token in every stage or see every single ending a game has to offer, that’s in no way realistic. But I expect reviewers to have pushed through the main campaign to see the end credits. My opinions largely stem from reading review after review of Final Fantasy XIII and the waves of criticism it received for being a “ series of hallways,” only for the game to meaningfully open up beyond the point many reviewers managed to reach. Reviewing a game you haven’t beaten yet always felt a little presumptuous to me, like judging a book before its Act 2 has even started. And yet, here I am, about ten hours into Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, only two chapters deep into a sprawling fifteen-chapter campaign, and I’m already forming opinions that feel too defined to ignore. Turns out that age and limited gaming time have a way of softening my old convictions, and so rather than wait for a full conclusion on a game that I may never finish, this is how I feel about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.
There’s something immediately compelling about Tainted Grail’s premise that hooked me long before the systems started to wear me down. The idea that the great heroes set out on a grand adventure to save the realm, but failed to return so now you need to figure out what happened to them, creates this melancholic, haunted tone that permeates everything. Kamelot is no longer a shining ideal but a looming, foreboding structure, coated with the grime of a century of greed and avarice. The land of Avalon is choked by the Wyrdness, and whatever remains of Arthurian legend feels distorted and uncertain. You’re not stepping into the boots of a chosen saviour, but instead you’re picking through the aftermath, trying to piece together what went wrong. I’ve always loved this kind of narrative framing, where you’re following in the footsteps of legends rather than becoming one outright, and Tainted Grail leans hard into that mood, leaving a breadcrumb trail for you to follow. It’s strange, bleak, and consistently intriguing in a way that makes you want to keep pulling on its threads. That is, when the gameplay allows you to progress the narrative, at least.
Exploration is where that narrative lives. Moving between locations, unlocking new locations and story passages, and making choices that branch into further consequences. Often a location or path will ask “If you have part 1 of this quest line, go to this verse, if you have this status, go to this other verse. If you have this item, go to this third verse. Otherwise, go to this verse”. It’s intriguing and when you manage to hit one of those conditions, it’s exciting to feel like you’re progressing, plumbing the depths of the world. But there’s no strong system for tracking those where those threads are left, so it often turns into a vague sense of “wasn’t there something back there?” whenever we manage to get a new status or learn part of a quest line. I suppose I could be keeping a journal and be writing down every keyword and location we come across, but that’s overly onerous. Getting back to those locations isn’t always trivial either, and the energy requirement of movement and exploration often means that revisiting old ground always comes with a tangible opportunity cost. What should feel like uncovering a living, reactive world instead sometimes feels like trying to recall half-forgotten notes from earlier sessions two months while wading through a waist deep bog and your food supply has run dry.
I’ll stop beating around the bush, the resource management systems are where most of my frustrations lie. Everything in Tainted Grail revolves around scarcity, and not in a way that feels empowering or satisfying to overcome. The path forward can only be explored when adjacent to a Menhir. Lighting Menhirs generally requires a bounty of resources. You will have to spend significant amounts of your actions just gathering the resources to dump into a Menhir, just to reveal the next 3 location cards. Adding to that, travelling to locations and exploring them cost energy, which is limited. At the end of each day, you can rest and recover your energy back up to it’s maximum (depending on your health, but I’ll get to that in a moment). If you happen to have dipped into the 1 or 0 section of your energy, you’ll only recover 4 points, but avoiding that will leave you with 2 unspent energy, which will often recover up to a max of 6, so you’re often only recovering 4 points anyway? And your energy limit is capped by your current health, meaning if you’re close to death you’ll be given even less opportunities to find the resources you need to come back.
Healing opportunities are limited enough that every point of damage carries some long term consequences. Each day when you rest, you consume a food and heal 1 point of health. But the resource dumps that are the Menhirs are constantly ticking down and need to be relit, creating a background pressure that never lets up. You can’t idly explore each nook and cranny, lest you run out of resources and your Menhir’s light goes out, leaving you alone in the myst. So instead of doing something you want to do, like exploring ploy threads, you’ll spend hours of your gameplay grinding out encounters to stockpile the resources you need to survive and light the next Menhir, all so you can maybe explore one or two more cards before you go back to the resource grind.
That menhir lighting loop can be exhausting, both mechanically and thematically. There’s a version of survival pressure that enhances immersion, making every decision feel meaningful and every success feel earned, but in Tainted Grail, so far it feels like busywork that exists to slow you down and gate the more interesting parts of the experience. Spending hours grinding for resources so that you can afford to take a handful of meaningful actions doesn’t create tension so much as it creates inertia. I don’t feel like I’m taking bold choices or making risks, I’m just stabilizing your position just enough to keep going, kicking the can down the road while the systems demand I spend more time amassing resources to dump into a bonfire. And then when I finally do have the resources to do something interesting, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place.
The encounters add another layer to this, and they’re probably the most interesting and most frustrating part of the design at the same time. The card-based combat system revolves around playing cards from your hand and building a timeline of events, where the matching icons put red cubes on your enemy. That, coupled with the different effects each card doesn’t, each encounter feels like a puzzle, asking you to make the most of a limited hand while dancing around the consequences of your actions. There can be a brief moment of glory when you manage to evade the enemy’s attack and set up a strong next turn, especially when you can coordinate with other players land that final blow to end the outcome in a dramatic flourish. In theory, it’s clever and engaging.
In practice, especially in a multiplayer setting, it can become a slog. Because the resource system is so punishing and resources are so tight, every decision feels like it needs to be optimized, and that leads to extended discussions about the best possible sequence of plays. A single encounter stretches into a 30-minute discussion as each player analyzes their options, weigh risks, then checks what the other players have landed on, only to go back and reevaluate their options again, all to end up with sequence of moves that has us taking one damage instead of two. And even when you do make progress, the combat system pushes back against you by just straight up undoing some of your progress, removing the cubes you’ve placed, moving the goal posts further away. It creates this rhythm where you’re constantly teetering on the edge of success, only to be dragged back to the start by a bad draw or an unfavourable tag, turning what should have been a moment of triumph into yet another round of recovery.
All of this is compounded by the multiplayer experience, which feels fundamentally at odds with how the game wants to be played. With three players, if the party separates, then individual turns become long, involved processes where one person is actively engaging with the story, reading the verses, deciding how they want to approach the encounter while the others watch and occasionally offer input. If you enter encounters together, you’ll spend 3 actions (one for each player), and everyone gets to be involved, but not all the rewards scale to the party size making this choice feel wasteful. It feels like both choices are bad, but to add onto this, Tainted Grail often forces players back together. Particularly because lighting the Menhirs require the party to be gathered before they can be lit, but also because you’ll often run into an encounter that requires specific traits that you might not have. Splitting up to cover the most ground seems like the best option, but that makes the game contort from a cooperative experience into 3 solo games where you need to wait for your turn with the encounter book.
What’s frustrating is that I can see a version of this game that works much better for me. Stripped of the multiplayer downtime, with pacing entirely under my control, I suspect a solo experience would allow the narrative and exploration to breathe in a way they currently don’t. The decision-making would feel more immediate, the consequences more personal, and honestly, I’d probably just enact a house rule and turn all the resource requirements down a touch. But I don’t really play solo games, let alone big narrative ones, and that makes it difficult for me to meet Tainted Grail on the terms where it might shine the brightest.
That friction, between what the game is and what I want it to be, runs through my entire experience. I genuinely enjoy the world that’s been created here, and I find myself drawn to its mysteries in a way that few campaign games manage. The reinterpretation of Arthurian legend, the sense of decay and loss, the slow uncovering of what happened to the heroes who came before you, all of it is so intriguing. I want to follow those threads, to see where they lead, and to uncover the larger picture that’s being hinted at in fragments.
But the gameplay systems wrapped around that world feel like they’re constantly pushing back against that curiosity. Every step forward is negotiated, every moment of progress paid for in resources and time. Instead of feeling like I’m uncovering a story, it often feels like I’m working a day job to earn the right to read a single chapter, before I have to return to the resource grind.
There’s also the lingering issue of the revised rules, the so-called “2.0” ruleset that supposedly addresses many of the complaints surrounding the original system. On one hand, it’s encouraging to see a game evolve and improve based on player feedback. On the other, it highlights how rough the initial experience can be, and I find myself resistant to the idea of needing to retrofit a game mid-campaign to get the “best” version of it. I don’t particularly want to print updated materials, rely on apps, or navigate multiple versions of the same system just to smooth out an experience that should have been fun, right out of the box.
Where I’ve ultimately landed, at least for now, is that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is not a bad game, not by a long shot, but it is a frustrating one. There are ideas here that I genuinely admire, and a world that I find compelling enough to keep thinking about even when I’m not playing. But the combination of punishing resource management system, drawn-out encounters, and a multiplayer structure that introduces more slog than flow, makes it difficult for me to enjoy the experience. I can see the version of this game that I might love, probably one that’s through solo play and house rules, but I shouldn’t have to house rule a game to make it palatable. The version of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that’s in front of me feels weighed down by its own systems. I’m drawn to Avalon, but I’m increasingly exhausted by what it asks of me to stay there.
