Cool New Card Game “Unlock!” Emulates Escape Rooms
Escape rooms are a hot new social trend — they are enclosures a group of people are locked inside for an hour, wherein they must solve clues hidden within the room to escape within a time limit (usually an hour). Now a new card game promises to bring that experience home in tabletop form: “Unlock!” from Asmodee and Space Cowboy.
Each “Unlock!” deck comes with sixty cards and a companion app. The cards offer clues and hints, while the app counts down how much time you have and occasionally offers hints of its own. When you think you’ve discovered the right combination, try entering it into the app….but you may not be right. Up to six players can work together on the solution.
Your adventure begins with a starting card, explaining the situation in which you find yourself. To begin your escape, you then flip over this starting card and start the clock in the app. The card’s backside will show a map scattered with numbers corresponding to other cards in the deck. You will have to combine or otherwise use these cards to unlock more of the deck. As you proceed, you will be instructed to discard anything that you won’t be able to use again so you can keep your focus on the newly revealed puzzles.
“Unlock!” will launch with three different decks in the second quarter of 2017: The Formula, Squeek and Sausage, and The Island of Doctor Goorse. For more details on each, load up Asmodee’s website.