Exit: The Cursed Labyrinth

Exit: The Game – The Cursed Labyrinth is a co-op game where you work against the clock to decipher 10 riddles. There’s a lot of ‘Exit’ games by Kosmos Games now, which is testament to how brilliant they all are!

The setting for this one drops you into a historic castle tour, where you view a labyrinth in within the castle grounds. As you enter inside to check it out, there’s a terrible clank of the old iron gate slamming shut behind you. The skies darken, the gate refuses to budge… And then, horror of horrors, a gargoyle clambers into the scene! Can you work together with the rest of your ‘tour guide’ to escape this intimidating labyrinth?

Design duo Inka and Markus Brand have teamed up with Kosmos Games to create Exit, a series of thinky escape rooms. (Albeit, in a card game format. You can play this one in your living room!)

The Cursed Labyrinth works in the same manner as the other games within the Exit series. You and your team have a deck of 26 riddle cards, lettered A-Z – don’t look at them, yet! There’s also a booklet (the ‘notebook’) with a blurb introducing you to the scenario. An array of pages follow with text and images. You’ll be drip-fed riddle cards, which you pluck from the A-Z deck at the relevant time. You need to solve them together with what information lies within the booklet. You’ll need no prior general knowledge, but you may need to think in a creative manner.

When you think you’ve solved a riddle, align up the suspected code using the circular coding wheel. If you’re right, it reveals whether you’re correct or not. You’ll receive more riddle cards. Got it wrong? Try again – was there something you missed? Like real escape rooms, there are ‘clues’ (a mini-deck for each riddle), which push you in the right direction if you get stuck. You record the time it took you – minus how many clues you used – to get your end-game score. Can you and your team escape out of The Cursed Labyrinth?

The Exit series of games come with a range of difficulty. The Cursed Labyrinth is weighted 2/5 (1 being easy, 5 being very hard). This is an intermediate challenge within the series of Exit games. Some of these puzzles might involve thinking outside the box, though! Please note that this is a one-time activity, also known as a ‘destructible game’. You might need to cut, fold and draw on some of the components…

Player Count: 1-4 Players
Time: 45-90 minutes
Age: 10+