Description
Contents of the Deluxe version
- Letters to Adriana, a puzzle-free introductory short story about the life of Nicolaas Maester before his death.
- On Circus Grounds, a 2-4 hour escape game about love and death in a Victorian Circus in 1883.
- The Final Act, a 1-2 hour puzzle game set thirty years later, where the aftermath of Nicolaas’ death leads to another circus mystery.
Authentic yellowed, hand-written documents and letters. Old photographs, mysterious drawings and weathered trinkets. Remnant of the nineteenth-century crime scene. On Circus Grounds is a cold-case for enthusiasts of puzzles, escape rooms, murder cases and history.
Awards
Winner Best Illustrator – Bullseye Awards 2022
Winner Silver Player’s Choice At Home Games – Bullseye Awards 2022
Further contents
– Five letters telling the story of Nicolaas Maester
– Old photographs from 1883
– A map of the Circus Grounds
– Encrypted letters
– A notebook with scribbles from one of the characters
– Mysterious objects
– More than 15 different hand-written and authentic documents
– An entire different puzzle escape game within The Final Act envelope.
ATTENTION: Nothing in these games intended for consumption in any way
Replayability
You can play this game only once, because afterwards you’ll know the solution to the puzzles and the story. In On Circus Grounds, there is also a component you can use only once. Do you want to regift or sell your game after finishing it? You can order a refill pack with us. If you keep the documents in good condition, you can easily sell on your game with our refill pack and earn back a big part of your spent money!
We loved it!! One of the best designed games we had up to now❤️
Excellent game with premium quality materials. I hope they make more games like these.
My only suggestion would be to improve the packaging as some of the documents were bent.
I loved this game! I backed over Kickstarter and delivery was startlingly prompt. I played it over Zoom with two friends who had their own copies, and we were all delighted by it.
Normally I avoid puzzle games that involve assembling timelines and assigning motives, because (without naming names) they usually 1) follow a somewhat predictable template (often withholding crucial information until the last possible moment, which makes all the work *prior* to that information feel useless), 2) involve a lot of letter-by-letter decoding with the same cipher over and over, 3) can get a bit nonsensical when it comes to explaining why things are encoded at all, and 4) in the worst cases, can involve a level of nitpicking (when assembling the timeline or comparing testimonies) that I don’t find fun. So I was blown away when On Circus Grounds avoided all four of those pitfalls. The story was rich and elegant, there were no last-minute twists withheld from us, the ciphers were fun and varied, there were strong story reasons for everything to be encoded, and everything about the timeline and testimonies was signposted in a way that felt fair. Several times when one of us was reading the deciphered text aloud, the others would gasp, sigh, or comment on the beautiful story. It got a strong emotional reaction from us.
That’s not even mentioning the beautiful design of the components – the handwriting, the drawings, all of them were filled with little touches that made it feel real, made us handle things more gently.
Would gladly recommend to both narrative game lovers and puzzle lovers.
The Kickstarter debut of this game gave me a lot of respect for you as a company. I have never had such a quickly delivered, well thought out, uneventful pledge before; and on top of that, what you produced was beyond expectations. There was obviously so much passion and thought that has gone into producing it.
I have not had the chance to get everybody together to play through all of it yet, so I’m afraid I can’t give feedback on all the puzzle elements, other than they are some of the best quality I have experienced, It always makes you feel like you are really opening a grandparents old treasure box and discovering their past lives and scandal you had no idea about.
After this success, I am looking forward to see what you porduce next. Good luck!