Escape: The Curse of the Temple

Escape is co-operative game where everyone is trying to escape the titular temple, which – you’ve guessed already – is cursed.

There’s no board, instead the in the box are whole bunch of room tiles and how many you use depends on how many players you have. Everyone starts in the same place – the safe room – with an adventurer piece stuck in the heart of the temple, and everyone has five dice each to roll. Hit the timer on the game’s website and the game’s soundtrack starts – everyone has a very literal ten minutes to get out – there are no turns, everyone rolls at the same time. Your dice have several faces that are used for different things – torches and keys are used to access rooms and collect gems – more on gems shortly – and any new rooms are represented by another tile being flipped and added to the play area. Adventurers are used for movement. A cursed mask means the die result is frozen in place – it can’t be rerolled – and a golden mask will free two such cursed dice (your own or your companions) from their inaction.

So there’s a flurry of activity as everyone moves around the temple, discovering new rooms, moving into them, collecting gems, and hoping that the critical exit tile will be revealed. However – twice during the soundtrack a bell will toll, announcing you have a short time to get back into the safe room where you started – fail to do so, and you lose one of your precious dice!

When the exit tile is found everyone must make it out before time runs out. How hard it is to get out depends on how many gems you have collectively gathered – you must each roll as many blue keys when on the exit tile as there are unclaimed gems still left in the temple. If you make it out, you can gift one of your dice to a player still trapped inside. Hopefully everyone makes it home alive before time runs out – if anyone doesn’t, you all lose!