Photo above is property of The Curious Correspondence Club
Company: The Curious Correspondence Club
Game: Chapter XVIII: Calling Card
Country: Canada 🇨🇦
Language: English
Type of Game: Tabletop Game 📬
Genre: Mystery
Date Played: August 9, 2022
Difficulty (based on 1 player): 5/10
Size of Team: Unlimited (Age 12+)
Time: Unlimited (Suggested: 60-90 Minutes)
Price: $21.95 (free shipping in North America); Monthly Subscription: $19.95/Yearly Subscription: $179.00
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Moving through the streets and alleys of London, you finally discover what you were looking for. Draped in caution tape, you find an old red phone booth that looks like it hasn’t been entered in ages. Stepping under the tape and into the phone booth, you find a mix of items scattered around the booth including a directory of names and numbers. This confirms that this is where you need to be but who do you have to contact? Short on both, time and pocket change, you only have one shot to figure out who’s number to dial and where you need to head to next.
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Opening up the classic Curious Correspondence Club envelope, you are greeted with the novel-like story on the envelope and the checklist of items off to the side. In this mailing, some of the key items you will get to play with are a subway map and ticket, drink coasters, coins, a postcard, and more.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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After reading the story on the envelope, you are nothing but immersed in the narrative and objective of the game. Having played a few of their previous games, this one felt the smoothest to me. The signposting on how to start, how to progress, and what you needed to do was straightforward. With what was packed in this envelope and being able to solve the puzzles with no online material required always catches me off guard. If you are looking for hints and the final video once you solve everything though, you will need to access them on the internet. One of the other standard things you can find in most CCC games is being able to make something tangible to work with in the game and there is no exception here as we were able to interact with a telephone booth and rotary phone.
One of the feedback with some of the CCC games is that you are typically looking for a set of numbers and there is not a way to confirm your progress without looking at the solutions. For Calling Card, I found that most of the puzzles were self-confirming. As I solved them, I knew for sure I had the correct answers and they stood out as being more obvious than some of their previous games.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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"Calling Card" can be played non-linearly so there can be a few people working on different puzzles at one time. If you follow the order laid out for you, though, the puzzles ramped up quite nicely. The puzzles required you to read into the instructions and figure out what needed to be completed. The final puzzle was also the right amount of challenging and satisfying once you realized what needed to be done. There was one puzzle though that did stick out a little bit where I needed to use the hint system and could have been better as you need to be familiar with words and the word discovery did seem a little random.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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Curious Correspondence Club knocks it out of the park with their high-quality game that fits into an envelope. This one is definitely one of my favorite CCC games. From the well-written story at the start to the final video to finish the experience, I was engaged and immersed the entire time. The puzzles were just the right amount of difficulty where I did not feel frustrated but challenged along the way. All the puzzles fit well into the story including the memorable final puzzle. If you have been waiting to play a game with a few beginner or veteran puzzle friends and introduce them to Curious Correspondence Club, this is the one to do it.
(If you do decide to try this game, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)
Disclosure: We thank The Curious Correspondence Club for providing us with a sample of their game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.
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