Escape the Dark Castle

Note: This is a short really early legacy review before I started posting longer form review in our Facebook Group.

As we approach the end of Summer (and a board game marathon record comfortably broken) Jack(7) and I sit down to play Game 43 of the “Bailey family sorta Summer Board Game Bonanza” “Escape the Dark Castle.”

“Escape the Dark Castle” is a cooperative adventure game where you work your way through a 17-card deck, fighting monsters and gaining treasure… to help you fight those monsters.

The way combat works is simple. You choose a character (Jack and I have custom-made characters created by the original artist… so we played ourselves), turn over the next card in the deck and read. If you fight a monster it will have HP made up of 3 different symbols (strength, cunning and wisdom) and you have to roll those symbols on your dice to defeat it. Every round you do not kill it you take damage (and you are going to take damage).

It’s actually a fairly simple concept but this is a family fave of ours (we like it enough to get custom cards designed and made). There is enough variety on the cards themselves, and enough of them, to make it interesting and no 2 games are ever the same.

It gives choose your own adventure type vibes and it’s good fun.

Now theme wise it’s pretty unchild-friendly. There are scary monsters, zombies with flesh hanging off and evil sorcerers. I am happy with my boys seeing this but if you have a child who is more sensitive than mine it might not be appropriate (id also avoid the book of death that gives you gory death scenes when you die). All violence however is implied.

For older children wanting to tread into this type of game site a great first step, I would 100% recommend it.

Just to be aware I have the ultra everything collectors version and not everything shown here is in the standard retail version.

* While violence is implies there are a few scary pictures in the game.