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I don't know CPR. I can't tie a tourniquet. But I can work my way out of a locked, puzzle-stuffed room in 60 minutes or less.

I've been honing this vital skill over the last year as the current mania for physical "escape rooms" has made its way to the tabletop. In an escape room, a team of players works together to solve codes and puzzles that will eventually provide a means of escape. Usually this requires organizing a group, traveling to a physical location, and paying a significant per-person fee.

The tabletop versions are cheaper, of course, but our testing found that they are generally high-quality productions that deliver a good puzzle-solving experience. And because they lack the long rules explanations common to many strategy games, they can appeal even to families and non-gamers.

Want to host an escape room evening of your own? Here's our look at five leading titles. (We'll try to avoid spoilers by avoiding talk of any specific puzzles.)

Escape the Room

Some escape room games are simply collections of linked puzzles—just get out of the room, quick!—rather than narrative experiences. (The Unlock! series, for instance, has almost no story; the adventures and little setup and simply come to an abrupt end when you solve the final puzzle.) But ThinkFun's "Escape the Room" series layers some nice narrative icing drizzled across its delicious puzzle cake. If you want a story-driven experience, these are terrific choices.

The series so far consists of two games, Mystery at the Stargazer's Manor and Secret of Dr. Gravely's Retreat. Both feature a colored code wheel for solving puzzles—line up the right colors and symbols to see if you've solved a particular puzzle correctly. Each adventure is setup with a character- and location-driven introduction, and puzzles often advance the plot by providing notes, letters, lab diaries, etc. Winning (or losing) the game also results in a narrative conclusion. By the time you're done, you feel like a real adventure has unfolded.

The one possible downside to the series is its level of difficulty. Stargazer's Manor was extremely easy; played in a mixed group of kids and adults, the adults backed off from engaging with the puzzles because they were too often solvable by the kids alone. Though well done, the game felt too easy—though it might work with brand-new players. Because of this, I played Secret of Dr. Gravely's Retreat with my kids rather than with other adults—but the game stepped up the difficulty significantly and would have been terrific with a mixed group. (Finding an escape room game at just the right level for your play group is one of the challenges of the genre.)

Unlock!

The newest entry in the escape room craze comes courtesy of the biggest board game company in the world, Asmodee, which is known for high production values and strongly thematic designs. The company's Space Cowboys unit—publisher of games like Splendor and T.I.M.E Stories—is producing the new Unlock! line, so expectations have been running high. After playing a short "sample" adventure and two full-length ones, however, I'm not sure that the Unlock! series quite achieves greatness.

As expected, the production values and graphic design work in the Unlock! adventures are excellent, though unlike the other games on this list, each adventure is literally just a deck of cards. These cards can represent objects, machines, codes, or "other" items (rooms, penalties, obstacles). Each card is numbered, and new cards are revealed from the deck whenever its numbers appears on some other visible card.

The name of the game here is manipulation. Red and blue object cards can be combined; join the right pair, add up their card numbers, and you can then reveal that card number from the deck. Green machine cards can be manipulated through adding various numbers (at which point they often become red cards which can be joined with other blue cards). Yellow code cards require you to enter a four-digit code into the accompanying digital app. So far, so good.

Unlock! also features a "hidden pictures" element. Sometimes, the numbers and letters of unrevealed cards are hidden on revealed cards—written in tiny or unusual fonts in hard-to-read color schemes. Finding them doesn't require the puzzle-solving part of your brain; it requires you to squint very closely and in good light at small pictures. And these hidden elements are easy to miss—by design—which means that you and your friends might sit at the table for ten minutes, trying to puzzle out what to do based on the collection of revealed cards, only to find that you don't even have one of the cards you need because you didn't spot the number. This is frustrating, not fun.

Because the system limits itself to certain kinds of cards, the puzzles feel a bit more mechanical than in other escape room games. Part of this feel might also be due to the fact that the narrative is essentially nonexistent. Each adventure starts with a paragraph of throwaway text and ends by entering a final door code into the app; there's little attempt to tell a story or set up a compelling situation beyond, "You're locked in a room! Find a way out!"

If you want to try Unlock! for yourself, Asmodee has made a short print-and-play scenario available for download.