I’ve played a few of the Exit games before, as well as some other escape room in a box like games such as Unlock, so I was interested to see how my son, 7, would take to Exit Kids: The Great Beescape. This is an Exit game designed specifically for children over 5, and features a set of 6 riddles to solve, gaining pollen along the way, to help Betty the Bee get back to her hive.
Each of the 6 riddles in the game has 6 cards which are shuffled, choosing one of each type, to ensure that there is replayability, and no text involved (other than those in the rulebook to explain each of the riddles to those helping the little ones out).
Art and components
My son absolutely loved the art, how the game uses the box to help solve the riddles and collecting the pieces of pollen. There is a nice circular disc to choose the combination of animals for each riddle to see if you are correct and everything is bright and colourful. I would say the quality of the card animals and components is quite thin, and probably will wear down with a few plays.
Setup
This is definitely a game where someone needs to help out the kids involved, there is quite a bit of text explaining each riddle, and although my son was patient, I would recommend reading through all of the riddles in the instructions beforehand to make sure you understand them. In our experience, some of them could have been worded a little clearer, but once we got going, he really got into solving the 6 riddles, and was excited at finding out if he was right or wrong. Setup for each riddle is pretty quick, and the starting setup just involves shuffling each stack of cards and choosing one of each type, along with punching out a few bits of card.
Gameplay
My son really enjoyed solving each of the riddles in the game, and we found each of them to be a unique challenge, which was really good. Some of them were slightly easier than others, but all took around the same time, and involved using the box in various ways or the components from the box in various ways which made it exciting and kept his interest throughout. I feel like at 7, this was still enough of a challenge to be entertaining, but probably would be a little easy for kids 8 or older, but perfect for the 5-8 range. In terms of replayability, each riddle comes with 6 different options that are shuffled, so they can attempt the puzzles multiple times, although after a couple of times of completing the game, my son began finding them a little too easy once he knew what he was doing so go in knowing you may only get 2-3 plays of this before it becomes a little stale, although your mileage may vary depending on your child.
Overall
Both my wife and I sat with my son while he played through all the riddles, and the game kept him engaged throughout with genuine excitement and happiness when he completed each puzzle. The collecting of the pollen tokens added to this, and provided an ongoing reward for completing each portion of the game, as opposed to just turning a card over to say it is done. Each riddle seems perfect for 5-8 year olds, and your child will probably get a few plays out of this before exhausting it, and it’s nice that compared to many of the other Exit games, that it’s not just a one time puzzle. I thought the components were ok, and some of the different insects could have been more clearly defined, perhaps with different colours, as this led to a couple of errors in our first game.
Overall though, particularly that first game, Exit Kids: The Great Beescape is a really fun little puzzle game for kids to play and solve, just be aware that you’ll need to help them through that process but that means you get to share in their excitement at completing it too.
