Unboxed: Discover the Mystery of the Game Rules Before Jumping into the Action

What is a board game? Unboxed?

In Unboxed , you play as archaeologists who have discovered several materials of what very much resemble board games in your different excavation sites. But you only found the material that makes up these games, not the rules. It's up to you to guess them!

Accessible from 12 years old, for 1 to 4 players, and games lasting around thirty minutes, you all play together to try to find out how a game works, test it, before discovering its real rules.

How do you play it?

The box ofUnboxed contains ten games where you have to guess the rules, that is to say ten games.

At each of them, a short summary tells you the material you have found, a few lines of context, including in particular the name of the game, which orient you at the start, and asks you four rule questions which must be answered most precisely possible.

The only things we know for certain are the name of the game, and that it is played by 2 to 4 players who compete against each other (there is no cooperative game).

The material available to you is rather basic. Made up of a mixture of small colored pawns and a few cards. These cards represent rather simple illustrations and pictograms, and schematize how the game works, how it is set up, how the rounds take place, etc.

It's then up to you, all together, to try to find the rules of the game. To do this, you make hypotheses, then you put them into practice to truly test the game.

We refine our house rules as we try. They are very often missed during the first attempts. The four questions asked obviously guide your assumptions. If you get stuck, you also have access to a clue (often quite cryptic) for each question.

When you think you know how to answer the questions (or you're out of ideas), you look at the answers, and score more or less points based on the consistency of your assumptions, which determines how successful you are.

Then you can try the game with the real rules, complete this time.

Why play Unboxed?

Unbox is clearly the most original game you've played in a long time. It can easily be placed in the same category as investigation games or escape game , since it uses the same principles. Except that here we are not looking for a murderer, but for the rules of a game.

But for the rest, we are really very close: very simple rules (there are almost none), a game where we all play together, hypotheses which become more precise as we go along, etc. And a limited lifespan: once we know the rules of all the games, we can no longer play them (in the same way that we cannot redo an investigation once we know the culprit ). We know that this aspect is discriminatory for some, but it would be a shame to miss it, the experience is clearly worth it.

The most pleasant in Unboxed is obviously to test the rules that we imagine as we go along. Very often, the first attempts are completely unsuccessful. Then they are refined little by little, until they arrive at something that more or less holds up.

We end up very close to the real rules in the first parts. But the difficulty is slowly increasing. The latest games are really not easy to guess. We realize, in the space of just half an hour, all the work done by real game authors who spend hundreds of hours designing, testing, and refining their creations.

We also really like playing the “real” game, once we know the real rules. Even if the games offered are very simple, often revisits of traditional games that we all know. So we won't spend our evening on it, the box ofUnboxed does not hide within it the next playful hit. But we enjoy trying each game once or twice.

Be careful though, it is not necessarily for everyone. You need to be at least familiar with board games and have a little playful culture. If your only experience dates back to Scrabblewith your grandparents, you may have difficulty imagining rules. We cannot improvise as a fun expert.

Unboxedis a really very original game which, if you are its core target, is clearly worth a try. Its rules are really simple, its games are short, and as long as you have a little gaming culture, you will love playing apprentice game authors.

In short

We liked

• A truly original game, even unique
• The pleasure of testing the rules we invent
• Playing games with their real rules…

We liked it less

• …but only one or two parts, it’s still very basic
• Limited lifespan (like an investigation game or an escape game)
• Requires a little fun experience

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