Unboxed

• Designer: Jordan Sorenson
• Publisher: Wizkids
• Players: 1+
• Age:12+
• Time: about 10 minutes per dig, 10 digs in the box
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/429F8uJ

In Unboxed, you and your friends take on the role of archeology interns under the direction of Dr. Ramos. At the dig site, the team has uncovered ten caches of ancient board games and they need your help to figure out how they were played. The centuries have not been kind to the rulebooks, so you’ll have to infer the rules based on each game’s symbology, components, and your own experience and intuition. Hopefully you’ve been attending board game night regularly…

EXAMINE
Each of the ten dig-sites will grant you a specific set of components and a few questions to help guide your “research”.

EVALUATE
Figure out how the components work together.

PLAY
Once you’ve successfully recreated the rules, you’ll have a fully functional game!

Unboxed brings board game lovers and aspiring game designers a unique puzzle experience, which features a playful spin on the one-box mystery and many satisfying surprises! Dr. Ramos will be there to provide hints as you theorize and test your designs for all ten of the provided scenarios. So, what are you waiting for? Put your sleuthing skills to the test and get these ancient games UNBOXED!

Essentially, for each dig, you open the Dig Manual to your current place in the game, and it will tell you what components to grab out of the box.  There are a list of starting questions to guide you on that page, and each of those has a numbered clue next to it – should you get stuck on any of these questions.

You take the game bits and the questions and just play around with everything – trying to figure out how the game works based on the information you have.  When you think you’ve figured out the game, compose answers to the questions.  Then flip the page over and see if you were right. 

If you are playing this as a campaign, give yourself 3 points for each question answered correctly, and 2 points for partial answers.  There is a space on the final page of the Dig Manual to record and tally your points – as well as a scoring rubric to see how well you did.

In the end, I didn’t bother with that – in part because I mostly got stuff correct, but also because I was usually ready to just tackle the next Dig.  I really liked the puzzles here.  The first few were pretty simple, but the later ones definitely were challenging.

The box/rules also tell you that all of the games are playable – and while that is true – I tried a few of the games, and suffice it to say that I had more fun determining the rules of most of them than actually playing them.

In general, I like puzzle games, so I was interested in this one when I read about it.  There are ten puzzles (digs) in the game, and I left it at my work desk and just kinda worked on this during downtimes at the office.  As a result, I’m not sure exactly how much time it took me to do this, but none of the individual puzzles were overly difficult.  

As with many of these puzzle games, you can only play it once – but I feel like I had a good experience with this little box, and I’m going to happily pass it along to another puzzle loving gamer friend.  This is a game that can be passed on as you do not destroy anything in the solving of the digs.

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/429F8uJ

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale, Jim B
• Neutral.
• Not for me…