Holiday Hijinks Collection: Review
Information:
Mechanics: Escape Room
Player Age: 13+ Player Count: 1 - 4 PlayersTime to Play: 60 Minutes
Game Designer: Jonathan Chaffer
Player Age: 13+
Game Designer: Jonathan Chaffer
Introduction:
Today will be a mini-review focusing on three of the Holiday Hijinks games. These are 18 card escape room games centred around your favourite holidays: Halloween, Christmas, and Independence Day.
Holidays:
The Pumpkin Problem:
Someone is stealing all the candy within the neighbourhood. You are going door to door investigating kids to find out which dastardly fiend is doing this. Behind every door is a new puzzle that you have to solve in typical escape room fashion.
Key Points:
- Challenging puzzles that needed resources from information found on the app.
- Great use of the back of the cards. The doors were used for multiple puzzles.
The Kringle Caper:
The north pole has been shocked with a heinous crime! Interrogate elves, reindeers, and Santa himself to get to the bottom of the crime.
Key Points:
- Earlier puzzles were used a second time as it has overlapping information.
- The images on the back of the cards were hard to distinguish.
Independence Incident:
On Independence Day, you happen to be viewing the museum hall and you notice something odd in the exhibition that leads to a drastic turn of events. You have now been tasked by a government organisation to chase down the group known as the Culper Ring. It is believed that there are clues at certain American locations leading to a great treasure and now you have stumbled upon a path that may just lead you to that trove.
Key Points:
- As a non-American, I was lost on a lot of these puzzles but the information page helped with a lot of these.
- Great fun puzzles.
- Unique use of the back of the cards.
How to Play:
Each of these games has players using a website (app) for information that could be necessary for any of the challenges such as certain forms of communication and gaining hints like how to start a puzzle, which cards are needed, and riddles for sections of certain puzzles. All of this is used to answer the chosen card, slowly revealing more challenges and answers to the story of each holiday hijinks.
Final Thoughts:
Key Points:
- Cards are multi-use. Backs of cards and space on prior cards are used for later puzzles which adds more design space for the creator while giving challenging puzzles for the players.
- Great experience with an abundance of challenges limited to 18 cards.
- Information you learn for one clue can and will often be used in future puzzles.
- Once completed, the game is not reusable unless players purposely do not write on cards.
- Great themes.
- Hints had many levels of helpfulness.
- Cooperative gameplay can turn competitive depending on personality.
This review was done via print and play. This in no way interfered with the play experience as several cards needed to be written on to help solve the riddles. I am still slowly dipping my toes into the world of escape room games and some others have been too challenging for me to complete the game fully. I would say Holiday Hijinks is a great starting point to enter into these types of games, as clues were needed often but not for every challenge. My confidence in this genre grew as I solved each puzzle, helping to prepare me to face more escape room games in the future, hopefully including the other Holiday Hijinks.
One thing that these games did that I enjoyed was the implementation of the back of the cards. The Halloween puzzle used the back frequently, and the other two used the back for one puzzle. But the other two puzzles made up for this with throwback clues that had you using previously solved puzzles or information that started as irrelevant on previous cards. This created a constant feeling of larger puzzles that felt extremely satisfying when the challenge clicked. If you are a fan of escape room games or a beginner like me, I would heavily recommend jumping in with these holiday-themed games. They are perfect for including the whole family and it has easily earned a Silver Seal of Approval.
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