Base price: $18.
1+ players.
Play time: 45 – 90 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT Kids: Riddles in Monsterville was provided by KOSMOS.
My friend is in town! This is my best bud that I’ve done a ton of escape rooms and escape room games with, so expect some reviews of those things coming down the pipeline soon. It’s an ongoing popular genre, but I really don’t want to miss out on playing EXIT games with my friend that I’ve played every EXIT game with, you know? It’s an exciting streak. We’ve got another one today, so let’s hop right to it!
In EXIT Kids: Riddles in Monsterville, the monsters have come and taken all of your … locked (?) cookie jars! You’ve chased them home to Monsterville, which was certainly a bold choice, to say the least. What do you think is going to happen here? You’re in Monsterville. Lucky for you, they don’t set upon you like piranhas and leave only bones; they’re actually excited to see you! If you can figure out and solve their riddles, they’ll reward you with silver keys to unlock some cookie jars! Who knows what’s inside, though? One way to find out! So shuffle the six decks, draw a card of each color, and dive in to some new puzzles!
Overall: 7.25 / 10
Overall, EXIT Kids: Riddles in Monsterville is cute and fun! There’s a good variety of riddles, and I continually like the EXIT Kids system where you get six random riddle cards each time. That adds some nice replayability and I don’t exactly expect kids to memorize what cards they’ve seen across gaming sessions. Honestly, we couldn’t do it and we’re at least decent at memorizing things. Nowhere near the top 20% but, you know, we manage. I think there’s something to this series in that it’s still very approachable for younger players and parents or whoever can assist with some of the trickier puzzles if anyone’s getting stuck. Plus, it’s a cute theme even if I disagree with the implication that if someone robs you you should chase them down. That feels unwise.
I generally liked the puzzles quite a bit, save for the outline puzzle. This one has you look at outlines and try to figure out which are not outlines, which is fine and all but a little … on the dry side. I vastly prefer the emoji puzzle where you have to decide which monsters are making the faces depicted on the emojis, of the two. The other puzzles are a lot of fun! They range from solving a small jigsaw puzzle to picking out which monsters will eat which foods to even a very delightful tactile puzzle where you wrap a string around various sides of a rectangle to cross out monsters. There’s also a maze, and I kind of love mazes? They’re not exactly, you know, rocket science, but I think they’re a lot of fun. Plus I keep seeing ads for a mobile game where they’re bad at mazes and it’s infuriating.
Anyways, we’re enjoying the EXIT Kids series and hope that it continues! Is it a bit light for two adults who have played every EXIT game? Surprisingly no, but that’s mostly because we have our surprisingly-bad-at-puzzles moments. But yes, they’re cute. I really like how boisterous and colorful the games have been, too! They’re cute and engaging and distinct enough from the standard EXIT games that there’s room for either using these to bring up new puzzle gamers. I’d love to see how actual kids react to the games instead of just very silly adults, but I don’t have any kids so that’s kind of out of the question right now. In the meantime, however, I think it would work for younger players. If you’re one of those, you have or are proximal to kids, or you just like mazes, EXIT Kids: Riddles in Monsterville might be up your alley! It’s been cute.
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