Exit: The Haunted Roller Coaster | Exit: The Game - A Kosmos Game from Thames & Kosmos | Family-Friendly, Card-Based at-Home Escape Room Experienc...

I buy these games two at a time. I keep one for myself and mail one to my daughter in another state. We play over FaceTime and the design of these games allows us to interact and spend fun evenings together. Haunted roller coaster was fun. It had some tricky puzzles in it, and was just challenging enough for a beginner game. We have played some of the intermediate games already and still found this one acceptably challenging. You literally have to think outside the box when playing these games. The developers have done an excellent job making this challenging enough to keep you interested, but not so hard as to frustrate you. The HELP cards are great since you can start out with a small hint, then choose a greater hint if needed, and then look at the actual solution if you have given up. Sometimes we would look at the first Help card just to make sure we had all the pieces we needed to solve the riddle. We rarely ever had to use the second or third HELP cards in this game.

This was great for a family game night. Our family of four (2 teenage girls) solved it in about 90 minutes. The puzzles were challenging but not impossible. The clues are helpful if you get stuck. My only complaint - the first clue is always really obvious. Overall, highly recommend! The cost is significantly less than escape rooms while the puzzles are just as challenging and you get to do it in the comfort of your home.

I bought their Christmas advent calendar, so I got a couple of the single escape games to try them out and get a feel for what to expect. Everyone is different so some will find it hard and some will find it easy. For us, it felt like a great middle ground. Not super easy that we blew through it, but not too hard that we struggled or gave up. The theme was cute, I enjoyed all the pieces and how much of a VARIETY the puzzles were! It created a lot of conversation between us and brain storming on what to do. It took us 71 minutes and we used two help cards when we got stuck. The mysterious stranger was probably my favorite part lol. I am intimidated to try the harder versions as this was tricky, but overall it was a really fun date night activity and Im looking forward to trying more.

If you're new to the Exit Game series I would start here. The Haunted Roller Coaster is linear, meaning you solve one puzzle at a time and do not flip ahead in the play book until you solve it. As a beginner, it helps you get acquainted with solving these types of riddles and how the game works. This one would be good for playing with kids since it has some very easy puzzles, but there are some more challenging puzzles that they might need a little help with, depending on the child. It was enough of a mix that two mid-30 year olds still enjoyed the game. There's a bonus little mini-game after you beat the original game that kids especially will really like. Keeping the game intact and not destroying any of the materials so we could pass the game along was very challenging. We spent quite a bit of time photocopying pages and pieces so we could cut/bend/fold, which is standard for this series. But with patience, it is possible. We also really enjoyed The Abandoned Cabin which would be another great beginner Exit Game. But it isn't linear like this one which we felt made The Abandoned Cabin a little more difficult.

The Good: - Puzzles are well thought out (for the most part), and varied - Excellent design and artwork - Just the right difficulty for the group (adults) The Bad: - Unlike the rest of the game, one of the puzzles requires a massive leap of intuition - It's a disposable game, that said it's understandable why the manufacturer went with this business model The Ugly: - They desperately need to find a way for a group of players to see what's in the booklet at the same time. I ended up scanning the booklet and casting the images to our living room TV so that everyone had a chance to view some of the puzzles. There's simply no good way that four people can share the experience of looking at these small pictures together. I would highly recommend the manufacturer incorporate some of this material into their app to solve the problem. It's the only failing of this otherwise enjoyable game.