Base price: $50.
1+ players.
Play time: ~2 – 3 hours, likely split up over 24 days.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1, as usual. 

Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT: The Intergalactic Race was provided by KOSMOS.

My escape room friend visited this week! Unfortunately, we were absolutely swamped at work and so we didn’t get to do much or see much, but we did get to break out one of the EXIT escape room advent calendars! It may be a hot minute before we get the next one out, but it’s in process. It’s more fun to do the games in person, but we do have the ability to play them remotely and then discuss, which helps the entire review process a lot. Like I said, ongoing, but expect some more EXIT reviews in 2026 (along with, I presume, new EXIT games, but your guess is as good as mine). In the meantime, let’s check out the advent calendar!

In EXIT: The Intergalactic Race, players find themselves recruited into a trip across the cosmos! The prize? Hosting Christmas! That’s kind of a big deal, so, you know, everyone wants a piece of that. Spaceships and asteroids and a very specific gas station await as you as you embark, but you’ll certainly find more than that! Can you find a ship, a route, and a winning strategy? You’d best be on your way!

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I think that EXIT: The Intergalactic Race is a lot of fun! It positions itself as a beginner EXIT advent calendar, and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. It’s a nice entry point and it provides two backup puzzles for folks who don’t like two of the very specific (and challenging) puzzles. That’s good! I appreciate that kind of thing so that it doesn’t interfere with the pacing of the game, especially if you’re actually doing it right and playing it once a day through most of December. Some people like that sort of thing! I probably would, but then that would slow down the pace of my reviewing and we can’t have that. These do work as a year-round gift, though; the theme is always very Christmas-heavy, but you can really just spend a month playing through them or lock in and do the entire calendar in a single night. There’s a lot to take in either way. I’m also pretty impressed at the breadth and depth of content being created every year; these games have to take a while to make and they have significant constraints.

There are some things I don’t like as much, but a few of them seem to be at least loosely a printing issue? There’s one puzzle in particular where you might need to use the hint / solution guide if you see something pointing and you can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be pointing at. Another one has a cute premise but requires a bit more force than I traditionally expect from an EXIT game to see through to the end. That’s fine. But quality control issues are never a great thing and I did check for the first issue and saw that I wasn’t the only person struggling with it. From reading the solution it’s clear how it’s supposed to work, though. I did actually really like one puzzle that was a chunk of deductive reasoning / process-of-elimination, though, so look forward to that. The variety of puzzles is always a big part of the EXIT advent calendar draw, and this is certainly no exception; just make sure you actually look inside of the doors when you open them too!

So as usual, this is another successful EXIT game. I’m a big fan of the genre, granted, but I also appreciate EXIT as a series pretty particularly. They’re approachable and dynamic on their own, but they also demonstrate great structure and care, especially if you’re looking at exemplars because you want to get into making your own puzzles or something. I think they cover a lot of ground (not just because there’s been what, thirty or so of them?) and I’m consistently impressed that they can come up with new puzzles that challenge (and occasionally frustrate) me each time. It’s definitely one of the joys of puzzle solving, and the EXIT games have been a huge reason that I’m as excited about puzzle games as I am. If you’re looking for a great pre-holiday puzzle, you want something fun to do every night with a loved one for a while, or you just like escape room games, EXIT: The Intergalactic Race is another great entry in a now-venerable series! I’d recommend it for sure.

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