Can You Puzzle It Out?
Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden is a beautiful blend of escape room mechanics with jigsaw building. The Exit The Game series, where you are presented simply with a series of riddles to help you solve your challenge, is a great way to experience escape room style fun in the comfort of your own home. These were followed by the Exit The Game Puzzles where your escape room riddles were presented to you in the form of four small jigsaws which you would build as the game progresses. Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden is the next step into the realm of combining jigsaws with board games by giving you one large 500 piece jigsaw puzzle which you have to build and complete before you begin your game of riddle solving.
Game Unboxing and Setup
In the box of Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden is one large bag of jigsaw pieces, a rulebook, a playbook, and a few pop-out pieces you will need to play the game.
In terms of basic setup, all you need is to open the bag of puzzle pieces (and read the rulebook) which takes no time whatsoever. But if you’re looking at how long it takes to set up before you can actually play your escape room, well that depends on how good you are at jigsaws, as you will need to complete the whole jigsaw before you begin the game itself.
Gameplay Overview
Unlike the Exit The Game series, Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden doesn’t give you any riddle cards, help cards, or answer cards. Instead, once the jigsaw itself is built, this becomes the game board and you build what is essentially a grid marker on the outside of it, this grid marker will, when you think you know the answer to a riddle, help you locate a specific jigsaw piece, which is your answer, and a clue to solving the final riddle.
The riddles themselves (of which there are seven) are located in the playbook, which sets out a story for you as you go through them one at a time, progressing to the next riddle when you find the code to the correct answer and collect the right jigsaw piece, all of which are hidden within the jigsaw itself, and require some logical thinking, some careful positioning, and just a teeny bit of maths to work out.
At the end of the seventh riddle, when you find the correct answer, the game is won by the team, don’t worry, if you don’t get it right first try you can try again.
Final Thoughts
Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden really brought my husband and I into cooperative thinking mode, we don’t usually do jigsaws and working together is paramount. I love how this particular game, unlike others, doesn’t require you to destroy components in order to play which means you can play again and again if you want to or pass it on to a friend to have a go at when you’re done.
There’s no difficulty rating on the box, which I think is something that’s missing, as other Exit games give you an overall difficulty rating out of five and some break this down into components such as strategy and luck to give you a good idea of how hard it’ll be before you start. Personally, we found the riddles themselves pretty easy and the challenge for us was building the jigsaw itself, which is all part of the fun, but we would have loved the actual riddles to be a bit harder as we’re familiar with the escape room style gameplay, that being said, this makes it great for newcomers to the style of game.
There’s also no player count on the box, possibly because this falls under the jigsaw category more than it does under the board game category. Previous Exit games (or most of them anyway) suggest a player count of 1-4, for this particular one, I’d say 1-2 adults is ideal.
My Own Playthrough Score?
Ok, so, I like to give my own score where I can on my reviews, particularly for ones like this, as I think it’s a great way of sharing with you, the readers, more about the game and myself (skills, or lack of them!), however, Exit Puzzle The Alchemist’s Garden doesn’t actually have a scoring mechanism like the other games in the Exit series, again, probably because it falls more under the jigsaw category. But if it did have a scoring mechanism, I think we’d have scored highly, as we didn’t need to use any of the help texts in the book and completed the riddles in around 30 minutes, it did however take us just over 2 hours to build the jigsaw so whilst it’s not an official score, I think perhaps I’d give us a 9/10.
About the Author:
My name is Charlotte and I’m a married mum of two boys, one with special needs, and one who is turning into a gamer like me. I love board and video games and have been playing games since before I can remember. Ever since picking up my first EXIT game (The Abandoned Cabin) I’ve been a fan of the series and I’m not far off from playing them all.
