Yeehaw! The City Adventurers headed west…….well, west London. We moseyed down Watford high street and found themselves at Escape Hunt Watford. How could we resist their challenge to Escape The Wild West?
Plot
You are miners that have struck gold in the tiny frontier town of East Victoria. However word has got out about your discovery and the bloodthirsty Bill French Gang are on their way to claim the gold – and kill everyone in East Victoria for good measure!
With no sheriff around and no cavalry riding to the rescue your only hope is a rusty old locomotive that hasn’t worked in years – but with just one hour to get it going and escape with your lives, you need to think fast and work even faster.
Review
After a brief introduction by Owen, our Games Master, we were shown into the room to begin our search for the gold.
Luckily the gold was already formed into bars, so all we had to do was find the gold bars, fire up the old locomotive and escape. OK that sounds a little too easy.
Well, to move the train and transport the gold, we also needed to find coal to fire the engine.
And we had to find enough coal to transport the weight of the gold we were carrying. Less coal, meant transporting less gold.
Oh, and did I mention that the gold and coal are hidden throughout the game and can only be retrieved by solving the puzzles.
Not so easy now, huh.
There was a great range of hands on puzzles. Typical for the time, they were made of wood and metal. Padlocks were used throughout the game, with a few hidden tech devices. We prefer the physical challenges, so we loved it. Our biggest problem was seeing the numbers on the padlocks. (Not a lighting issue, more of a bifocal issue)
With two of us playing, the game had a fairly linear flow, although we had choices on what to attempt next, so I’m guessing with more players, game play is not so linear.
There is no clock in the room, so you can’t easily tell how fast you are. However, the GM does give warnings and suggests you start the train, eg when you have 15 minutes left. We, however, considered that 15 minutes was plenty of time to find more gold and coal. There were a couple of puzzles we were close to solving, so we carried on playing. Other teams may try to get less coal/gold but get out quicker.
Having retrieved as much coal as we thought we needed to transport all the gold, we stoked up the engine and made our escape in 54 minutes.
A fantastic game that we thoroughly enjoyed playing. Recommended.
Aside
We were very pleased to see the GM’s heading to the rooms with cleaning equipment after teams left. Masks in the room were optional.
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