Base price: $30.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of The Key: Escape from Strongwall Prison was provided by HABA.

Alright, it’s essentially go time for PAX Unplugged, and I’ve accomplished basically nothing because it got dark and cold out and I slept for a week. I love that for me, and I feel extremely well-rested, but I’m also a bit behind. So, we’re writing reviews at midnight, a throwback to the old 2017 What’s Eric Playing? Method of working where I got all of my reviews done between 2 and 4AM. Is that healthy? No. Is it fast? Yes. But we have fun, here. This latest game actually vexed me a few times because I kept calling it Stonewall Prison, not Strongwall Prison (and, annoyingly, have my photos saved under the former on my computer). I’ll work on my literacy later, but in the meantime, let’s check out a new entry in The Key series!

In The Key: Escape from Strongwall Prison, there’s been a prison break! And these are some pretty bad dudes. One sabotaged a theme park! That’s just a jerk thing to do. You’ve put some of these folks behind bars before, so they’re asking you to come and figure out how they escaped so that it won’t happen again. You don’t have to … catch them; they got caught pretty quickly. These aren’t really masterminds, which is why the escape is so concerning. You also need to figure out the complex network of their gang affiliations so that you can discern who’s helping them and why. You’ve got a lot of evidence to pour through, but can you crack the case?

Overall: 7.5 / 10

Well, overall, I had been clamoring for some time for an Expert-Level The Key game, and I certainly got it, and it’s great! It’s fairly complicated, which I enjoy. See, you’re not just figuring out who did what, when, and how; once you have that, you have to figure out the various members of their respective gangs, which will give you numeric transformations that you have to make to the code to get the final result. There’s layers! The one thing I don’t love about this is that the transformations are applied from left to right based on the 1 / 2 / 3, not based on the order of the people pictured on the board. There’s a lot of opportunity to get confused there (and I’m pretty sure we did at least once). It’s vaguely clear on the board, but the big bold pictures of the gang leaders in left-to-right order is a stronger implied ordering than the explicit ordering on the board, I suppose. I do think that’s my only major complaint, though; other than that, the increase in complexity is a lot of fun.

One interesting thing that happens is that there’s more player interaction here: certain cards require you, upon drawing another card, to reveal an open interrogation card, giving other players information for free. You don’t necessarily know that these cards exist before you draw, so you might accidentally help other players while conducting your own investigation, which is super. A nice way to increase player engagement in an otherwise fairly solitaire game. Interestingly, even these interrogations may not necessarily be helpful; the gang members lie about their bosses every time. The trick is, if you know who their boss is, you can figure out the truth (or vice versa!). I like that extra layer of things (and I’m also a bit impressed that this all works with the multiple paths that a game can take based on which key you pick). I’d love to see how this could be implemented in other The Key games.

I think that this step up in complexity is definitely great for experienced players, but I would certainly encourage not starting with this entry. There are a lot of good ramps in, but this one is serious. Honestly, I still can’t solve some of the spot-the-difference puzzles in the game, and I’m an adult. It vexes me a little bit. But that’s a conversation for my therapist or my optometrist, probably. I’ve always been a big fan of The Key series, though; I like the logic puzzle of it all, I think the speed elements are nice, and I think the theme is a little goofy. I particularly like the continuity threads here, both in that all nine characters are culprits from previous games and the game mentions that you’ve investigated the Royal Star Casino before. That kind of stuff fills me with joy. I don’t love the “feels bad” that is drawing cards that don’t help you, but that’s also kind of the name of the game. If you’re looking for a more complex The Key experience, you enjoy solving a prison break, or you just want to know what happened to those Lucky Llama Land guys, you’ll probably enjoy The Key: Escape from Strongwall Prison! I certainly did.

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