The Escaporium: A Christmas Advent-ure

Having been opened for 2021’s festive season, Christmas Advent-ure was long closed by mid spring when I got to Halifax, but the owners kindly allowed us to play it anyhow, since it hadn’t yet been torn down. I’m not sure whether it’ll be available again next Christmas, so this review may be purely for retrospective interest.

This is a score-based game. Your goal is to gather small wooden tokens called PUDs, which you then feed into a collector that gathers them off in a rather satisfying manner. There’s no set number which represents victory, so you’re trying to get as many as possible; for enthusiasts teams playing efficiently, gathering the whole lot is a tough but achievable outcome.

Cute puns are par for the course for Christmas games, and the title of this one is because the game structure imitates an advent calendar. There are 25 locked boxes, which you tackle sequentially, each releasing some PUDs plus something needed to unlock the next. Not that the boxes are all neatly lined up waiting for you: some are visible at the start, but others need to be found or uncovered later in the game.

And although the primary thread of the game is wholly linear, there are a few bonus puzzles and search targets to find, which helps keep things from feeling like a bottleneck when the team is struggling with one of the boxes. Even so, unlike most “grab all the stuff” games, this one is well suited to a smaller team, or to a family group with kids. Since so much of it is sequential, it’s not vital to divide and conquer the way that it is in most score-based rooms.

As Christmas rooms go, this one is not particularly large in terms of physical footprint, nor the most elaborately decorated. Its strength is in the puzzles, which I imagine is why it got a particularly warm reception from enthusiasts when it opened. The structure gives a clear sense of progress, and presents you with one puzzle after another that’s solid, varied and enjoyable. For non-enthusiasts there are other Christmas games that focus more on the festive cheer and eye candy, but if you’re here for the puzzles, this game delivers.