If you have ever gone out with family or friends and tried an escape room, you will know that they can be an expensive but fun experience. I have never been to an escape room venue but do love playing at home escape rooms, especially when the kids can join in. Trapped do a series of at home escape room game packs that are family-friendly with varying degrees of difficulty. They take between 1-2 hours to play and solve. The first game in the series is called The Art Heist which we played recently and to be honest, it wasn’t the greatest of games. But I’m not one to be deterred and tried again with the second game in the series, The Bank Job.
There are two series of the Trapped at home escape rooms in a box. We tried the first game in the series, The Art Heist (Series 1, Room 1), and are now trying the more difficult The Bank Job (Series 1, Room 2). It has a puzzle difficulty rating of hard. In the box there are all the clues and components needed to turn any room in your house into an Escape Room. Players need to work together to solve all the puzzles resulting in cracking the safe and escaping the vault. After our experience with The Art Heist which was a medium level puzzle, we didn’t have much hope for this – but I can happily say that we were wrong.
In the box:
- Instructions
- Code Reading Square
- Posters
- Clues
- Props
- Solutions
The Bank Job is an interactive puzzle-solving game for children and families. Everybody plays together, there is no board or turn-taking, players must try to solve all the clues to escape as a team. It has real codes to crack, puzzles to solve and tests to pass. An ideal party game escape room in a box.
In The Bank Job, you and the other players are a gang of bank robbers. Intel suggests that if you’re a party to this one job, you’ll be set for life! Locked in a secure vault and under heavy surveillance, can you work together as a team to pull off the crime in the nick of time? Sleeping gas has knocked out the security guards and everyone else in the building so you are safe for now. But hurry! In sixty minutes you’ll need to choose your strategy: finish the mission or abort and run!
As with The Art Heist, I really liked how the game is packaged up in a box that looks like a gift bag, with very little plastic used at all with the components being card and paper. The box contains an instruction sheet which tells a story to set the scene, along with multiple cards and clues to solve, a Code Reading Square to help decipher clues as you go along and even little props and posters to really help make you part of the game. The only extras you need to supply are pens, paper and, of course, the players.
The puzzles and clues are placed around the room. Trapped escape room games are interactive, there no sitting around a table and not getting involved allowed. ALL the players must work together to try and solve the clues and puzzles, and not necessarily in any order. This works great as if you are struggling, you can go off to another clue and revisit later (this eliminates a lot of frustration, especially in younger less patient players).
If you do get really stuck on any clues and find that you are at an impasse, there are hint reference numbers on the reverse of the clues which allow you to look for individual clues through a cipher. We thought this was a great way of doing it as it is impossible to accidentally see answers to other clues, or even to be tempted to have a sneaky peek!
If you read our The Art Heist review, you will be aware that we had some struggles with it. The Bank Job has a higher difficulty rating, and to be fair it is a more difficult game to play and solve. Whilst definitely harder, the clues were much more coherent, not as obscure or abstract and gelled better with the other clues. We did resort to the hints on a couple of occasions but were then kicking ourselves afterwards that we hadn’t seen what was so dazzlingly obvious!
Overall, The Bank Job was an enjoyable fun and challenging game with brilliant puzzles to solve and so much better and less frustrating than its predecessor. It provided more of a test but as it was a more coherent and structed game it felt easier than The Art Heist despite hard clues and puzzles to solve. But it is a team game and working together is key, and different ways of thinking is a big feature in an escape room game.
As with the previous game, it can be packed away back into its gift bag style packaging and re-gifted for someone else to play. I like that it is not a one use game, a throwaway game, even if it can’t be played again by the same people.
The Bank Job is so much challenging fun; entertaining, enjoyable and worthy of top marks. The concept of the game is great, the components are good and the re-gifting (albeit clearly used) is a wonderful idea (and cuts down on waste).
The Bank Job is an excellent at home escape room game, one that gives the adult brain as much of a workout as the children’s brains and you really do have to work together to solve the puzzles. A fun and entertaining game for family game nights, children’s parties, family gatherings etc.
Rating: 5/5
RRP: £13.99
Available to buy from Amazon here.
