The Curious Correspondence Club - "Chapter XXII: Crossroads"

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Company: The Curious Correspondence Club

Game: Chapter XXII: Crossroads

Country: Canada 🇨🇦

Language: English

Type of Game: Tabletop Game 📬

Genre: Mystery

Date Played: January 1, 2023

Difficulty (based on 3 players): 8/10

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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Journeying through the mountainous terrain and climbing along the rocky trail, you reach the Great Valleys. Surrounded by the breathtaking landscape of mountains, trees and rock, the Nexus confirms that you are in the right place. As you enter the nearby village of Luska, a man recognizes you right away and pulls you aside. Handing you a package left by his great aunt, he tells you that she travelled and roamed these lands her entire life and if she hid something here, all the information you need to find the next disc are in this package.

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Opening up the CCC envelope, you find many curious items including a pamphlet similar to the one you would find at a national park, wooden signs, a translator wheel for the local language, a language board and more.

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After reading the novel-quality introduction and checking out the beautiful sketches on the envelope, the tone was set to play the game. The set up for CCC games is that there are 5 puzzles and the solutions of the 5 puzzles will help you solve the final meta puzzle. For this game, there is a lot of information that you will have to read. One tip is to pay attention to the details of the text. There is always a clue there to help you along to solve the puzzles no matter how cleverly blended into the text it is. There were a few puzzles that after rereading a few times, the eureka moment hit us.

One of the things I always love with CCC is once you know the final answer and head to the website, you can input the final answer and if you are correct, you are rewarded with an outro video to close off the chapter of the adventure.

Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

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The range of puzzles were a mix of logic, ciphers, and some that required some eureka moments. We found this game to ramp up nicely as there were a couple of puzzles we recognized and were able to solve right away with a few others that required some reading and rereading to get us to that eureka moment.

One complaint we did have with this game was that one of the puzzles was based around a cipher but the text we were looking to translate had a different style than the decoder, which made for some difficulty in matching them up.

The hint system for this game requires you to go to their website and for each puzzle, there are 2 hints before providing you with the solution. For this game, we found the solutions to be more straight forward than their other games. Since the introduction stated that the solutions were to be 6 letter words, it was easier to tell if we had gotten to the correct solution or not.

Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

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"Crossroads" was another fantastic chapter in the CCC universe. There were some nice eureka moments in the game with the clever cluing in the text. The pamphlet and translator wheel were things I could imagine picking up in a National Park as well as the 3D signpost really brought the game to life. This time around, there were 3 of us playing together and found that there was a lot of overlapping information, so it was difficult to solve things separately. A tip here was to have your camera phone on hand so you could easily snap a picture of what you need to solve your puzzle and hand off the information. Any puzzling nature lovers would easily get on board with this game. With the season 2 ending coming up fast, the story started to take an exciting turn and we cannot wait to see how the story continues.

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(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.

#MatthewLui #AtHomeGames #TabletopGames #PuzzlesByMail #SubscriptionGames #Mystery #Canada #TheCuriousCorrespondenceClub