puzzle games

Exit: The Catacombs of Horror.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Exit games since I first tried & reviewed them a year and a half ago. The series, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017, comprises a series of single-play games that mimic the experience of an escape room, asking you (solo or in a team) to find a series of codes to solve the puzzle, generally destroying the game’s components as you go. They’re fun, appropriately difficult, usually playable inside of an hour, and come with a structured system of hints in case you get stuck. My daughter and I do these as a rainy-day activity, and I think we’ve played at least five so far, enjoying most of them.

The series steps up in difficulty with its newest title, Exit: The Catacombs of Horror, a longer title playable over two sessions, with puzzles that promise to be harder to solve … which is true, because this game was almost certainly not playtested, with puzzles that are far less straightforward than those in previous titles. The puzzle you have to solve to finish the game is a joke – even after reading the third hint card, which is supposed to explain the solution, I still have no idea what the designers expected players to do. There’s a huge failure of design here: You don’t make puzzles more difficult by making them too obscure to solve.

Exit’s puzzles come in all sorts of forms, but there are some common types, from deciphering codes in texts, finding hidden characters or images in printed materials, cutting and/or folding the materials to reveal patterns, or finding images that look like numbers. All of the game’s codes comprise three digits, so you know that will always be your goal; you use a decoder disk, entering the three digits under the symbol for the puzzle you’re solving, and you get a number for a card in the answer deck, which tells you if you’re wrong or refers you to the next clue. These puzzles generally range from very direct to a bit weird, often when the game wants you to see a number in an image or in something you’ve drawn; they take an especially liberal view when it comes to visual representations of numbers in sketches or lines.

The Catacombs of Horror, however, increases the difficulty by making things harder to see or to follow. One puzzle requires cutting images out of one of the cards, but the dashed lines that would tip you off that the designers want you to cut are almost impossible to see; my vision is fine, and I had a hard time spotting the lines, so I can’t imagine how hard it would be for older players or anyone requiring glasses. Another required finding blue dots on a large poster, except one of the blue dots was located on a teal flashlight, so the colors were nearly identical. There’s a puzzle that requires assembling a little cardboard box and threading a string through it, then looking through cutouts in the box’s sides and deciphering the number shown by the strings, once they’re pulled taut, which was a complete flop – yeah, I get why they said that looks like the number 2, but no average person is going to get that. It’s too inside-boardgaming for me, and I say that as someone who’s played most of the titles in the series.

Then there’s the final puzzle, which I won’t spoil because I can’t. I still don’t really get what the designers wanted me to do, even after a detailed reading of the last card – and my daughter, who loves these games but had lost interest before we finished this one, didn’t understand it either. It involves a lit candle, a ‘column’ with arrows that you place in a little plastic stand (which didn’t work – the column was way too flimsy and narrow for the stand), and then … a shadow? It’s the only time we’ve played an Exit game and given up. There’s no way they tested this final puzzle with regular game players, and I feel like the English translation of the last hint card (the third – each riddle has three hint cards, the first just a guide to start you, the third the solution) was inadequate.

I’m still interested in the series – there are four other new titles this year, and I see at least three previous titles we haven’t tried yet – but I can’t recommend The Catacombs of Horror unless they revise it, especially the final riddle. If you’d like to try the Exit games, I suggest The Abandoned Cabin, The Pharaoh’s Tomb, or The Secret Lab as a starting point – and feel free to ask me questions in the comments if you get a little stuck.

Indian Summer app.

Game designer Uwe Rosenberg has managed to make a reputation for himself with two very distinct genres of board games – very complex, low-randomness games of worker placement and resource collection, often with rulebooks running twenty pages long; and light puzzle games that ask you to fill out your personal board with Tetris-like pieces while achieving certain side goals. I’m not a huge fan of the former, other than his original Agricola, but I like the latter quite a bit, including the first one, the two-player Patchwork. He’s followed that up with the “puzzle trilogy” of Cottage Garden, Indian Summer, and this year’s Spring Meadow. The first two now have app versions – I presume the third is in development – and, since I have the physical version of Cottage Garden, I decided to start with the app version of Indian Summer (android • iOS), and report that it’s pretty good across the board.

The basic move in Indian Summer is to place one of five tiles in your personal queue on to your 8×9 board, which is divided into six segments. The tiles can cover three, four, or five spaces at once, and every tile has a single ‘hole’ in it that allows anything printed on the board to peek through after you’ve placed the tile. When you place tiles to cover an entire segment (12 spaces), you then gain any treasures that appear through the holes in those tiles – berries, nuts, mushrooms, and feathers, each of which grants you some special ability. When one player fills out his/her entire board, that becomes the final round, after which players will get one more chance to play their nuts (#phrasing) before the scoring. You get one point for every space covered, up to 72, and then one bonus point for every nut you have left over.

The treasures are the key to the game, of course. Playing a feather lets you place an additional tile on the same turn. Playing a mushroom lets you place the first tiles in the queues of any two opponents. Playing a nut lets you place a squirrel tile, covering a single space, anywhere on the board. Playing a berry lets you refill your queue from the main supply before the automatic refill that occurs when your queue is empty. You can also trade up that chain at a 2:1 ratio, such as two berries for one nut, or down at a 1:1 ratio, such as one feather for one mushroom.

If you create certain three- or four-hole patterns with the tiles you place, you can place a bonus animal tile that matches that pattern and then score the treasures a second time. Since every board has just one feather on it, this is the obvious way to score a second feather – place tiles in a way that the feather is visible and part of a pattern matching an animal tile. There are even four animal tiles that come with a treasure of their own, one of each type, of course.

The app has run extremely well for me so far and provided sufficient challenge with the AI players to keep me playing. The tutorial could be better – it’s goofy, but didn’t make all the rules clear, especially not with the animal tiles – but I figured out the rules with some trial and error as well as one check in the online rulebook. The colors are fantastic, and using the app to move and rotate or flip pieces is intuitive. You can also easily click to see opponents’ boards, but the app is smart enough to give you a tiny thumbnail so you can see at a glance how close each opponent is to covering all 72 spaces.

The AI skill levels seem to vary by the amount of time the app gives itself to decide on its next move; the hard AI players can easily take ten seconds to decide on a move, which is weird but actually reassuring in a way, as (I assume) the AI player is running through a huge list of potential moves before settling on one. I can beat the hard AI players about half the time, but the main challenge is finishing the board first because the AI players clearly favor that goal, with adding animal tiles their second criterion. It’s easy to get the shaft because an AI player filled out its board and triggered end-game, especially if you were the first player to go, since then you don’t get to place any other pieces beyond the one-space squirrels. I’ve noticed more than one instance where an AI player could have ended the game (I think) but chose not to do so, which seemed suboptimal when it happened – not for me, though, as I appreciated the extra turn.

The app has a great undo function that rolls everything back to the start of your turn, which is great for trying different scenarios out to see what has the best outcome. It seems to follow strict and not entirely necessary rules about using those optional actions; for example, if you’ve played a berry to add tiles to your track, you can’t then decide to play a feather to place two tiles on this turn, which doesn’t make much sense to me. That also means you can’t place a tile, play a berry, then place another tile.

I think I still prefer Patchwork as a game for its simplicity and the pure two-player experience – Indian Summer plays two to four – but this is very solid, and it’s a bit simpler than Cottage Garden too. My lone complaint with the game, rather than the app, is that the scoring is so tight that it does feel like the winner is often determined by the randomness of the draws, both what board you get and what tiles appear when. Since you can’t win if you don’t fill out your board, it’s a bit of a race as well. I’ll keep playing this one but I don’t think it’ll replace Patchwork for me any time soon. It does mean I need to pick up Cottage Garden’s app, though.

Exit: The Catacombs of Horror.

Indian Summer app.

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