EXIT: Theft on the Mississippi

Exit: The Game – Theft on the Mississippi is a co-op game where you work against the clock to decipher 10 riddles. This isn’t so much a traditional scenario where you’re attempting to ‘escape’ from a locked room, though. A callous robbery has occurred, while you and your associates are on board a steamboat, travelling down the Mississippi. You step up and volunteer yourselves as private investigators. Can you and your team find the perpetrator before the riverboat docks in New Orleans? If you fail to do so, the thief is going to escape from your clutches for good!

Design duo Inka and Markus Brand have teamed up with KOSMOS to create Exit, a series of thinky escape rooms. (Albeit, in a card game format. You can play this one in your living room!)

Theft on the Mississippi works in the same manner as the other games within the Exit series. You and your team have a deck of 26 A-Z riddle cards. There’s also a booklet (the ‘notebook’) with a blurb introducing you to the scenario. An array of pages follow with text and images. You’ll be drip-fed riddle cards, which you pluck from the A-Z deck at the relevant time. You need to solve them together with what information lies within the booklet. You need no prior general knowledge, but you may need to think in a creative manner.

Think you’ve solved a riddle? Align up the suspected code using the circular coding wheel. If you’re right, it reveals whether you’re correct or not. You’ll receive more riddle cards. Got it wrong? Try again – was there something you missed? Stuck? Like real escape rooms, there are ‘clues’ (a mini-deck for each riddle), which push you in the right direction. You record the time it took you – minus how many clues you used – to get your end-game score. Can you and your team find the culprit in time?

The Exit series of games come with a range of difficulty. Theft on the Mississippi is weighted 3/5 (1 being easy, 5 being very hard). This is an intermediate challenge within the series of Exit games. Please note that this is a one-time activity, also known as a ‘destructible game’. You might need to cut, fold and draw on some of the components…

Player count: 1-4 players
Game length: 45-90 minutes
Age range: 12+