Base price: $17.95.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1

Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT: The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes was provided by Thames & Kosmos.

Another EXIT game! This is, to my knowledge, the last of the EXIT games that I’ll be able to play with my current game group in its current iteration, which makes me sad! I’ve played, I believe, every EXIT game with my current group? So this is it (I’m moving, so it’s mostly on me for breaking up my game group), but we’re going out with a bang! We got to do two more EXITs in one session. One you saw a bit ago: Jungle of Riddles, but now let’s find out what’s happened to Sherlock with EXIT: The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes!

In EXIT: The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes, something has happened to the master detective! You’ve been contacted by Dr. Watson, as the author of an article critical of Sherlock has been murdered and obviously, Sherlock is the prime suspect! Since, you know, he’s just going to go kill some guy who criticized him in the paper. He’d be great at the internet. Thankfully, you’ve got an idea who might be behind it all and you’ve got the means to solve the puzzles that Sherlock left behind to prove it. Will you be able to catch the criminal at the heart of all of this, even if that criminal is Sherlock himself?

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Overall, I thought EXIT: The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes was another solid EXIT title! There are some fun and entertaining surprises in this one (even beyond Professor Jane Moriarty), so I’ll avoid spoiling all of them here in my review, but there’s a lot to like. It’s a nice, modern reimagining of the Holmes mythos, so it’s a diverse cast of characters who are all involved, interesting, and contribute to your case in different ways. There are a variety of good puzzles, to boot, which confounded us a couple times but were still a lot of fun to figure out. There’s even some option for a bit of simultaneous puzzle solving, giving multiple groups of players things to work on in parallel. Plus, it wouldn’t be a mystery to solve without finding out if you were right or wrong, yeah?

There are also some challenges with this one. One thing that we found grating about the parallelization of puzzle-solving is that there’s a puzzle later on that really only works if you’ve seen everything the game has to offer, which means that if you split the puzzles within your group, you’re not going to have players with complete information. That’s also hard to recognize within the context of that puzzle, which can lead to some player frustration. A bit clearer markings would go a long way in general with this game, though that may be partially because of the printing of it all.

That said, I overall enjoyed the narrative of the puzzle (I really like the more mystery-focused EXIT games, in general) and I appreciate the interpretation of the Holmes mythos against the backdrop of an EXIT game. They’re naturally symbiotic, so it was good to see them engage with and play off of each other. I’d be interested in more EXIT Sherlock Holmes stories, if this is a standard example of what they’d look like; there’s a lot of fun to be had in this world and this specific iteration of the Holmes mythos. I hope we get to go back! If you’re a fan of Sherlock Holmes, you’re down to solve an EXIT mystery, or you just want to know what’s on those mysterious yellow cards in the box, check out EXIT: The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes! I had a lot of fun with it.

---

If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!