Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 7 out of 10

   joshuabruns

   Solid storytelling/escape room style game. Great cartoon art. Game is very long (2.5 hours+) though and I'm not sure if a casual gamer could stand that length. My 11 and 9 year could barely hang on. Sometimes you'll hit a wall and people will get really frustrated but just keep pushing through! Gets more exciting at the end. This game is a shorter version of Adventure Games: Discover the Story, and blends elements of Coded Chronicles and Unlock! (no app though). If you don't like any of those games then you probably won't like this one.

2. 9 out of 10

   boredguy77

   Really enjoyed this one! I played with my 9 year old and we both had a blast solving the puzzles. It's unfortunate that this is a one-time play cause I want the story to continue. Nothing beats the satisfaction of my kiddo finding a solution I didn't and watching the story unfold together.

3. 8 out of 10

   LabRat002a

   I've played a few mystery adventure escape-room games where you combine numbers from actions, objects, and locations to read entries in a book, and I may like this one the best so far. The theme really comes through. Very nostalgic. The puzzles are at a level that kids and adults can play. When you have characters interact with things, there are hints in the text that aren't necessary to all players, but do help with a younger audience. And there's a separate hint system too if needed. Not only do you have the revealing of location, cards, and interactions, but you also have 8 secret envelopes to open with more puzzly bits. Originally I thought there were more missions in the box, but this is actually just a single mission split into 2 chapters and a short finale. But I played it solo in about 4 hours without hints so there's a decent amount of game. You can play with any number of players (depending on how involved each of the players want to be in each of the puzzles/interactions). The game has Velma, Shaggy, Daphne, Scooby, and Fred but all players control all characters. You can decide to take turns, or just work more as a group. The game is semi-serial. You need to solve puzzles in order, but pieces of puzzles are revealed to you before you can do them. It's not hard to tell what needs to be solved next. As a puzzle solving mystery game, you can really only play through it once (until you forget about it), but you can reset the game easily enough to share it with someone else. The map cards and deck cards are all numbered so you can easily sort them. The 8 secret envelopes don't have as much stuff in them as you might think (though they really make the game feel bigger) and the game has you return items to their envelopes as you play sometimes. And it's not hard to take notes of what came from what envelope. Though you really need a pocket knife or letter opener to remove the tape when opening envelopes, unless you don't care about ripping them open. The game is also good about cleaning up cards as you play. When something is no longer useful, it has you remove it from the game so you don't waste time coming back to it. Though the game does miss having you discard a small number of cards that are no longer useful. At the chapter break and the finale break, the game will score you on how many important cards you are missing, and give them to you for free. I was missing one card at the chapter break and one at the finale break, but did feel cheated there because I could have still gotten both after the break, and I didn't know the chapter break was coming up or that it would score like that. At the end of the game, you have to guess the murderer. I got it right, but I wasn't 100% confident either because I wasn't sure which direction the game was intending for a piece of evidence. But I was happy with the ending. There was one reason Velma gave that I don't agree with based on the pictures in the cards, but my solution didn't depend on that reason at all. I had only lost 3 Scooby snacks by the end of the game, but the game gives you 20 and the end game scoring is very positive and doesn't actually matter. If you feel you did well enough and you had fun, that's all that really matters. I liked the variety of puzzles and how some of them really were stretched throughout the mansion. And while you receive parts of puzzles before you can do them, you can decipher whether they are meaningful yet or not. It wasn't always obvious what the numbered labels were next to in the game, but there really wasn't any problem caused by that. Cards often give a zoomed in view of a map location, and many times have the location card written on them too so you can keep track of what they are, though not every card does that. The rules mention that you won't be penalized for trying to interact with anything, except for when it's a puzzle, but I did come across a few items that don't have entries in some of the character books for characters who can be present (the gum, the washing machine, the sweater thread). I didn't count those as penalties given what the rules had said about interacting. The rules were vague on how to order numbers when combining items and locations. It seems like you just keep the numbers sequential, whether that means putting the item before or after the location. The game at least seems to redirect you to the right entry when you put the numbers in another order. But otherwise the rules are quite simple and the game is easy to jump into without any prep. You will want to take good notes in the game. It helps with puzzles, but you also need to remember which characters have interacted with what or you might miss revealing a card and be frustratedly stuck. Make sure you don't miss revealing a card when told to. The components are pretty good. Nice cards, envelopes, and cardboard pieces. The character standees could have been nicer, but they are functional. I was disappointed the box doesn't have a separate compartment for the deck of cards as they can just slide around after you unwrap them, but they fit in a half sized sandwich bag well. I only caught one formatting mistake in the books, and it didn't hurt anything. There is one particular puzzle in the game that is not color blind friendly; heck I'm not even color blind but the colors in that puzzle didn't seem to match how they should, but I was able to solve it without error. That puzzle was a little surprising given that they have another color puzzle that also includes shapes to differentiate the colors. But it was a good puzzle, so I see why they included it despite that. There are hidden clues you need to find in some pictures too, but it's not about things being too tiny to see; it's more like it's invisible to your brain rather than your eyes. I did notice a couple cards had tiny circles on them, which I thought was going to end up being something, but wasn't; it might have just have been an artifact of the printing. But generally the pictures are clear. The numbered entries in the books and cards work well, but could have been a little better so that you didn't have to flip through as often. After all, you are likely going to want to investigate everything in the room, so why not put a whole room on the same page rather than keeping the last two digits the same for a room. And why have entries that tell you to take multiple numbered cards from different places in the deck at once when they could have been adjacent. But it's really not a problem since the numbers are clear. The game is fairly good about avoiding red herrings altogether. And the couple it does have can trip you up at first, but they are easy enough to come back from, and feel deserved. The puzzles were easy enough that I was never stuck for long, but hard enough to feel earned. There's not that many items to combine with things, unlike some other games, so you don't feel like you have to just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. And it's pretty clear what characters need to interact with what. The research and investigate abilities are pretty interchangeable in meaning, but you don't have all characters available at the same time. Some get trapped in secret rooms, so you have to use a subset of who is available at a given time. Which is thematic, but also helps avoid feeling like you are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The game does warn you when you are about to enter the finale, though it is difficult to decide whether you should continue to the finale or keep searching, as there are still quite a lot of cards unrevealed when you enter the finale. Overall, a really great game with only minor drawbacks.