ThinkFun - "Escape the Room: Murder in the Mafia"

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Company: ThinkFun

Game: Escape The Room: Murder in the Mafia

Country: USA 🇺🇸

Language: English

Type of Game: Puzzles By Mail 📬

Genre: Murder Mystery, Mafia

Date Played: October 29, 2022

Difficulty (based on 2 players): 5/10

Size of Team: 1-3 Players (Ages 14+)

Time: 2 Hours (Approximately)

Price: $34.99

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You’re Chicago’s top private investigator and haven’t always gotten along with the mafia…but you didn’t expect to find their enforcer shot dead on your office carpet by your own gun. This doesn’t look good…between the police and the Family, you’re going to be in serious trouble if you can’t figure out what really happened - and quickly!

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All the fun of a murder crime scene without the messy clean up! The game pops up into a recreation of your P.I. office, complete with dead body on the carpet. There are also moveable bits of furniture, and silhouettes in the doorway. This game definitely brings a lot of character to the table, with its film noir detective vibe.

Photo above is property of ThinkFun

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It took us just under 2 hours to play, including ~5-10 minutes of setup at the start where you are converting the box into the diorama. Some of the setup is a little bit fiddly, but with a little patience it will all come together. The game is then broken into five chapters, each focusing on a particular suspect, with distinct puzzles to solve. We appreciated that there was a decent amount of story, with a brief intro and scenes for each chapter and the ending, leading to great opportunities for dramatic readings. You typically have access to multiple puzzles at once, allowing for a divide-and-conquer approach if desired, though we tend to prefer to solve together. ThinkFun also provides an online soundtrack that you can play to help set the mood as you play!

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There were a variety of spatial and tactile manipulations and logic puzzles, without any ciphers or decoding. Many of the puzzles are on the easier side, so suitable for younger or newer puzzlers, though we still enjoyed them! Hints are available as needed, with incremental steps as well as full solutions. There were no major leaps of logic, and we appreciated that some items ended up being used more than once. They also managed to create a variation of a decoding wheel that we hadn’t seen before. If you have older eyes like us, you might want a magnifying glass on hand for some aspects!

Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

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We really enjoyed the recreation of the crime scene and the way that things evolved with the arrival of different characters - very cute! And we always appreciate games that can be reset and passed along to friends. While it was not our preferred kind of theme, we appreciated how the story unfolded through the various chapters. You could certainly play solo, but we think all the more fun if you embrace their music and costume suggestions and make it a bit more of an event for 2-3 people. (Beyond three, it would be harder for everyone to see, unless you often rotated it around.) While they say 14+, aside from the general “murder” focus there is nothing particularly graphic, so we would have felt ok playing with kids who were slightly younger, personally. We’ve really enjoyed all the Escape the Room games that we’ve played! Not yet having played The Cursed Dollhouse, this was our first more diorama-style game from them, and it brought a fresh experience. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for an approachable game with great table presence!

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(If you do decide to try this experience, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)

Disclosure: We thank ThinkFun 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.

#KristaJones #AtHomeGames #TabletopGames #PuzzlesBMail #MurderMystery #Mafia #USA