Deckscape – Behind the Curtain

Deckscape is a cooperative “escape room in a box” style game. Players must work together by solving clues, gaining items, combining items, using items and ultimately escaping from a particular room, building or area. The whole game is made up of a deck of cards which are arranged in a particular order.

As the game unfolds cards are pulled out and kept aside for later which can help you solve future puzzles. Cards are split from the deck into piles and solved in a certain way, and players will work their way through the deck and hopefully escape.

Deckscape behind the curtain is a one to six player game designed by Martino Chiacchiera & Silvano Sorrentino and published by dV Giochi. In Behind the Curtain, you are caught up in a magician’s magic trick and must solve the illusions and puzzles to escape and you have 60 minutes to do so.

Final Thoughts

The Deckscape series gives me that feeling of an escape room in a box in the comfort of your own home all achieved with a single deck of cards. It is a wonderful system that I thoroughly enjoy.

Behind the Curtain takes you on a journey through a magician’s performance. There are locked puzzle boxes, illusions and lots of fun stuff to discover and solve. I really like how part of the deck gets split into multiple piles that you have to work through and solve.

You find something in one pile that helps you solve a clue or puzzle in another pile and so on. There were some tricky puzzles in Behind the Curtain but ones that never felt impossible to solve. The hint system works well and gives you just enough to nudge you in the right direction when/if you need it.

The Story

The story in Behind the Curtain was a fun one and had some interesting twists and turns (can’t say more than that without giving the story away). The “logic” behind the puzzles was sound and there were no farfetched jumps of logic to be made.

There was one particular puzzle that I thought had a specific solution that relied on some previous knowledge which might hinder some people, but the hint system is there to help. One of the puzzles had a physical element to it, it didn’t involve any card or component destruction, but it was still a fun twist on the puzzles.

Overall

Deckscape: Behind The Curtain was a very good instalment in the Deckscape series. I really enjoyed this one and would highly recommend this to anyone that wants to give one of these ago. It is a game that you have no need to play more than once.

The game is, however, completely re-settable simply by putting the cards back in numerical order and can then be passed on etc. As with the Deckscape games and similar games of this ilk I would avoid this with the higher player counts.