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Company: The Deadbolt Mystery Society
Game: The Game Show Murders
Country: USA 🇺🇸
Language: English
Type of Game: Tabletop Game 📬
Genre: Murder Mystery
Date Played: June 14, 2024
Difficulty (based on 4 players): 5/10
Size of Team: Unlimited (Recommended 1 to 4 ppl)
Time: Unlimited (Recommended 2 - 3 Hrs)
Price: $52.00 USD
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It’s the 1,000th episode of The Ultimate Game Show and you have received a special invitation to be a contestant. As you are in the studio getting ready, the host Rob Rogers pulls you aside to tell you that he was the one that sent you the invitation. He has brought you here because he is suspicious that someone will try to murder him during the 1,000th episode. Can you make it to the Grand Prize round and figure out who the killer is?
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Looking inside the branded box, on top of the DMS standard items that include a collectible trading card and the beginning brief, we find a letter from the killer, interviews with key people, a few other high quality items to examine and some envelopes to open as we progress through the game.
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Opening the box, we started the experience by reading the “Beginning Brief” sheet which kicked off the story. For those who are new to DMS, how the game progresses is once we solved the puzzles or believe we knew key information, we would scan QR codes and input the information. If we were right, something will open and continue the story or tell us more information. To continue through the story, they would also have envelopes with more clues and information for us to read once we were told to do so.
The theme of this game was perfectly done with the story, contents and flow all relating around the game show theme. Even one of the items in the box was a contestant badge. The story was well written in a more humous style. One thing our group was a fan of was that each envelope could be played non-linearly so we could easily divide and conquer.
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Most of the puzzles required us to make the right connections between items. The DMS team utilized the game show theme by including a bunch of puzzles based around familiar game show games. As someone who grew up watching “The Price is Right”, we saw a lot of tie-ins to some the show as well as other memorable game shows from the past. The core puzzles around the games though were direct and straight forward. We would know the rules to the game but at times, would need information from elsewhere to be able to solve it. There were also some high production video recordings of Rob Rogers explaining how each of the games worked.
How the hint system works is there is a document that can be downloaded online. It is a nicely formatted pdf that presents a table of contents at the start that we could find the puzzle we need hints on and go to that page. There are sufficient tiers provided for each of the puzzles. The solutions are provided in a separate document.
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"The Game Show Murders" included humor, nostalgia and puzzling fun. What really stood out here was that DMS mixed their style of puzzles and the game show theme together perfectly. The story writing and video production quality made it an easy game to follow and immerse us in. We played with 4 people and found that there was plenty to go around and lots of people able to work on puzzles. Any game show fanatic or armchair detective should “come on down” and make this game your “final answer”.
(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 Deadbolt Mystery Society for providing us with samples of the game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.
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