How to play the Escape Tales & Review (Spoiler Free)

Escape Tales is a cooperative, puzzle solving adventure game.

Title: Escape Tales

Year Published: 2018, 2019, 2020

Designers: Jakub Caban, Matt Dembek, Bartosz Idzikowski

Publisher: Board & Dice

Players: 1-4

Game Time: 180 – 540 minutes

Set-up Time: ~1 minute

Ages: 16+

Theme: Varies game to game in the series

Mechanisms: Cooperative, Puzzle Solving

How to win: Complete the story

Game Description

Escape Tales are a story-driven escape room in card game form, with immersive exploration, no time limits when solving puzzles, and a collection of tough choices that will captivate and immerse you deeply.

How to play Escape Tales

This is a review of the first 3 games in the series, but as there are so few rules you could use this video as a ‘how to play’ tutorial.

Themes

The Awakening is both spoopy and sad. There is a lot going on around the theme of loss and I found it difficult at times.

Low Memory was much more upbeat. Well, not much more but the discovery of the world and the people in it over the 3 chapters was a lot of fun.

Children of Wyrmwoods is set in a more fantasy setting which again had 3 chapters but the third was really short. The story was weird and interesting.

Setup & Rulebook

Very simple. Setup is just sticking stuff out there, pretty much everything in the box.

The rulebooks are very clear and the rulebooks for the 2nd and 3rd game let you know what has changed from the first game. This is very handy.

Components & Artwork

The cards are standard but good. The artwork is really nice across all 3 games giving each game a unique feel.

The app works well and does a really good job of being able to assist you without doing it for you, which I needed a lot!

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

There is almost literally nothing to teach. Once you explain that placing tokens causes you to read the labelled passage you’re done pretty much. The app will let you know who many cards the puzzle needs and how many characters the answer is. This is important as it gives you a starting point to solve a puzzle without giving you any clues as to how to do it.

This is an open info co-op so no accessibility issues really.

Escape Tales Round-Up

So obviously you can compare this to other escape style games suck as The Unlock! Series. In both of these, you’re using cards and entering the results in an app. Unlock! does have a big timed element though and you’re also marked down for using hints. Escape Tales is a lot more relaxed and story-driven.

They’re also replayable. I had a fair few cards left over after the games and the obvious branching choices gives you a chance to go back and try something different.

The Awakening was good and is a very good intro to the series. It’s basic but only by comparison to the future entries in the series. Here they laid the base layer for a decent game.

In Low Memory, they started to experiment with the board and locations cards. There was more innovation around these areas more than in other areas of the game. It really helped it stand out from The Awakening.

Children of Wyrmwoods innovated in other areas. The lack of a board, having a character, the unique layout of chapter 2 and especially card combining.

If you like this style of game this is a really good one to try, why not check it out?

Rating I give it 6/10

Note: The copies I played were review copies generously provided by Board & Dice, big thanks to them for this game.