ThinkFun Escape the Room The Cursed Dollhouse – An Escape Room Experience in a Box for Ages 13 and Up (7353)

This was very clever and we really enjoyed playing. It cost about the price of one person going to an escape room so we decided to try it. We already have people borrowing it so we will definitely get our money's worth. Some tips, have a light source (flashlight) if you are playing at night. With just overhead lights it was hard to see some details.Watch out, the tips are online but if you scroll past them, the correct codes are pictured. I would have liked them to be a separate link.

Hard to play when it’s missing the instructions and unable to find the beginning of the story even online or the clues. Several of the clues were just far fetched. Not well thought out in my opinion. Don’t waste your money. Would not recommend.

3.5 Stars. I got this for my husband as a birthday gift. He loves escape rooms and generally thinks the harder ones are better. With just 2 people, this took several hours (about 2.5) All in all, we got burned out after about an hour and a half. We wished we had broken it into 2 chunks and split it up across multiple days. A few of the puzzles really didn't make sense. We enjoy logic puzzles and are good at them, but we got stuck. Even after looking at the solutions, we thought the puzzles were too much of a stretch and were poorly designed.Overall a fun investment, but I would break it into segments to solve and suggest that they redo some of the less-logical puzzles.

We tried the Cursed Dollhouse game and really loved it. At first, I balked at the extra price, but now I understand why it’s pricier than Dr Gravely’s Retreat and Stargazer Manor. It’s an actual buildable dollhouse, and you explore rooms and discover clues one room at a time. There are a lot of props, too, which adds to your set of clues and to the experience. We’ve played Dr Gravely’s Retreat before and liked it, but felt it was pretty easy. This one is a bit harder; we had to use our brains, but didn’t really get stuck too much. This game has a lot more atmosphere, and a good balance between storyline and puzzling. We spent about 4 hours with two people, and didn’t use their hint system. I wish they’d make another! I was so sorry when it was done. Definitely worth the price.EDIT: We played Stargazer’s Manor a few weeks later. Having heard it was easy, we gave it to our kids (ages 5 & 9). They finished it without help from us in 70 minutes. Very fun and kid-friendly, but quite easy.

The pandemic has had my family playing more of this escape room type games: The Exit series, the unlock series, escape room in a box, etc. This is my first venture into the Think Fun Series.Replayability: First off, this game is only one experience, so the same play group can't play it again without knowing the answers. Secondly, they say this game is replayable for another group, but it only is in the sense that you can reprint materials online after (which is available on their website). Beating the game requires you to fold, disassemble, and otherwise modify the contents. I dont have a good color printer that could replicate the quality of this for another group, so I ended up treating this more like a one time experience like the exit series and i'll likely be tossing this afterward.Puzzling Experience: I think doing this as our first Think Fun Experience might have been a bad choice. We spent a good amount of time just trying to get used to the system of using their decoder wheel, which isn't all that bad, but still took time. Lots of moments we would find things in one room that wouldnt have relevance until a later time in the game. My family and I found lots of the puzzles frustrating, but perhaps that speaks more to our puzzle skills than the puzzle itself. Definitely be prepared to look around the rooms and connect the dots between the different things presented -- i felt some of the ties of the clues to the solution were kind of weak.Gameplay evolves like this: you start in the living room and have to find 3 symbols that are associated with the colors red, green, and blue. Once you do, you place those symbols and the colors into the wheel and if you're correct, the wheel will show you two matching symbols of the room you're in, saying you can progress the story. You then move to different rooms around the house in the same manner until you've explored the whole house and can complete the story. Personally, we found all the puzzles in the bathroom the most challenging. When we looked up the solutions, we wondered how you would even know to execute some of those solutions, as there didn't seem to have enough hints to guide you in that direction.Either way, i'll likely stick to the unlock & exit series. Their puzzles seemed a little more logical. They also pack more experiences for less money (Unlock is 3 experiences for $30, Exit is $15 each, and this is $40 for the singular experience at time of review).

The ThinkFun escape room games are very high quality and very well-designed. This particular one is very hard, and may not be for everyone. The official online clue system is helpful though. Also, the puzzles are physically small, so if you have more than two or three people, it could be tricky for everyone to participate.

As many other reviewers have noted, this version is not fun. We enjoyed the first two so much that I joined the ThinkFun email list and even pre-ordered this game.The puzzles are way too hard to the point of frustration. Even with using hints, which we didn’t in the first two games, the puzzles are hard to figure out. There are not intuitive so the parts that are supposed to give hints to help you figure out the puzzle don’t seem to go together.We made to the fourth room before quitting for the night. It’s been two weeks and we decided that we don’t want to finish. Some additional reasons: It’s hard to see inside the dollhouse for more than one person, you need a flashlight to see some of the things for how dark it is, and even have to pick up the dollhouse to move to see what you are supposed to find then the pieces that are supposed to be in the room, fall out.Also, in this version, you are required to destroy some of the puzzles in order to figure them out. This wasn’t required in the first two, and we liked that, so we could pass it on to someone else to play. There is the site that tells you how to put it back together which lets you print out the puzzles but it will never be the same.All in all, a real disappointment.