Game Reviews: Wild West at Breakout Games and The Inflation Monster Card Game

My family took me to a local escape room for Father's Day. The room is called Wild West at Breakout Games in Columbia, Maryland. The theme is fun: We were gold miners who had been robbed by some local bandits. Half of our crew was handcuffed inside a local saloon while the rest of us were just outside. So there were three tasks: free our friends, find our gold (hidden in a vault), and get the heck out of there. 

The game had a lot of old west flavor and we had a big enough group to solve all the puzzles in a very quick time. The puzzles had a good variety of mechanical and verbal solutions. The finale was satisfying. We had a lot of fun working together.

Very good considering we had 60 minutes to finish

At home, my daughter got an early birthday present, a card game called The Inflation Monster. It is based of an episode of the Tuttle Twins on Angel Studios, flagging up how damaging inflation is. Players start with a little money that they can invest in real estate, gold, stocks, bitcoin, or a new business. The various ventures bring in money in a couple of different ways. But after each player has a chance to invest, a die is rolled and the inflation number moves up (or possible down, though only one side of the die is a -1). Then everyone has to pay the amount on the inflation counter. Pretty soon, only one person is left with any money and is declared the winner.

It was interesting to play and brought up some discussion about what are really good investments and how you can mitigate inflation in various ways (including actions not in the game). We had fun playing though getting wiped out by inflation in the game is not so much fun. 

Playing the game

Posing for a picture