Base price: $18.
1+ players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1 

Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT: The Circus Mystery was provided by KOSMOS.

There’s a theoretical chance that I might actually end up ahead this week, if I play my cards right. It’s Friday night and I’m writing aggressively and I have three games, minimum, in the tank. They’re all EXIT games, which still works for me, but we’ve been cooking. We’ve solved so many mysteries, y’all. There may be some MicroMacro action still, but anyone’s guess. We’re ongoing. I was particularly pleased that while I was visiting my friend, I managed to bring this new Exit, The Circus Mystery, for us to try out. We also did … maybe another three in-person escape rooms? We’ve been quite busy this week. Vacation! More or less. But let’s talk about EXIT: The Circus Mystery.

In EXIT: The Circus Mystery, you’re going to the circus! Not for excitement or tricks or elephants (largely because the practice of circus animals has, for ethical and moral reasons, fallen out of favor), but because you’ve been hired to do so. Why? Well, it’s just the weirdest thing: in every city the circus has visited, a major burglary has occurred. Are these related? Possibly, but your job is to find out exactly how. Now, you’re not here on specifically official police business or something, so you are going to have to break into a few things. But it’s fine, probably. Can you solve the mystery under the big top?

Overall: 8.75 / 10

Overall, I think EXIT: The Circus Mystery is pretty great! I think it’s pretty hard to talk about The Circus Mystery without talking about its most stellar feature, which is the theme. Game’s all-in on circus shenanigans, and it’s great. Bright colors, silly characters; even the disk is a big top. Yes, generally, the disk is explicitly themed for the game, but it’s just fun because it fits. I’m not a huge fan of circuses personally, as, say, an activity to spend my time doing, but I enjoy the vibes. The puzzles are also extremely thematic, from weightlifting to a little magic to tightrope-walking. I really enjoyed how many of them also had significant physical elements to them. As I’ve mentioned before, I always worry after, what, 40-ish EXIT games (… wow) that things are going to start feeling a bit stale, but this was anything but. Great job to the Brands, especially Emely Brand; excited to see her taking an active role in what seems to very clearly be the family business.

We did run into one particular issue which was kind of funny, which is that we somehow managed to do an extremely mild sequence break and skip a puzzle? We needed to use a Hint Card as a result, since we were missing critical information from the Riddle Cards, but we didn’t realize that we needed them, to some degree, and that ended up leading to us pseudo-completing the puzzle, but in an incredibly janky way. It wasn’t a great experience. Having the benefit of hindsight, the puzzle still left us a little unimpressed, as it depended on the actual structure of its components. If you’ve played several EXIT games, well, there’s a reason that they can still hit that $15 – $18 price point: the component quality is intentionally low. It’s not bad, and I want to emphasize that, but you’re not getting sturdy, thick cardboard tiles or black-core cards at this price point. Unfortunately, the puzzle relies on some pretty thin cardboard not being flimsy, and then it ends up being, well, flimsy. It ends up being not my favorite puzzle. Thankfully, the overall puzzle quality is high enough that this becomes a relatively minor blip in an otherwise excellent experience.

I’m pretty pro-EXIT, as a series, on this site, and I acknowledge that. I love escape rooms and puzzles and logic challenges, and I think that EXIT does a great job compressing the escape room experience into a small, cheaper package without losing too much. You’re not crawling through anything or climbing anything, granted, but sometimes I also don’t want to do that. I’m a homebody. There are escape room games that I do think reach higher heights than the EXITs (namely a lot of the PostCurious titles), but EXIT has consistency that I respect, even when they branch out into new things (EXIT Kids, EXIT Family, the Advent Calendars, and the jigsaw puzzles, among other things). The Circus Mystery slots in among the better EXIT games, and I’m happy to see that. Great puzzles, a fun theme, and some interesting spins on the standard EXIT formula, which is good to see. To that end, if you’re a fan of the EXIT games, a fan of the … circus?, or a fan of crime, I’d definitely recommend checking out EXIT: The Circus Mystery! It’s been a great time, though maybe we whiffed that puzzle by starting the game at 11PM.

---

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!