Get into…On Circus Grounds overview
‘August 1883. The audience at Circus Maester goes silent in anticipation. Director Nicolaas Maester, a pale and bitter man, enters the ring. But before he can even begin his opening speech, he collapses and dies horribly before the very eyes of hundreds of onlookers.
Now it is up to you to get to the bottom of the case. In this dossier, you will find the evidence that was gathered at the time. Dive into a web of relationships and intrigue. Take a look behind the scenes and discover the personal lives of the 19th-century circus folk. Lives filled with secrets, love and betrayal.
Decipher coded letters, examine mysterious objects and discover the secret messages that the circus performers left behind. Who murdered Nicolaas Maester, and why? Who among them had reason to lie?
Determine your own approach, and the order in which you work. Make the right connections and reveal the true murderer of Nicolaas Maester after more than one hundred and thirty years.’
Get into…On Circus grounds gameplay
1 – 4 players
2-4 hours
15 + age range
3 word to describe this experience: intriguing, beautiful and exciting
Get into…On Circus ground components
Obviously with this kind of experience, I would be loathed to give all the details of the components. I do not want to spoil anything for anyone.
What I will say is that for this type of experience, the components are of an amazing quality.
We have done some of these type of mystery packages before and they are not all of the highest quality. In fact sometimes, you wonder what you are paying for and surmise that the money you have spent must be on intellectual property rather than anything physical that you receive.
From the moment, we opened the dossier, we were in awe of the many different types of evidence contained within. They were intriguing and not merely just pieces of paper as some of the ones we have tried before have been.
There are codes to solve, physical things you have to try to figure out, items to peruse.
The way in which you solve the different clues and puzzles is entirely up to you. However this is not so open ended that you have no idea what to do. There are obvious places to start and the puzzles whilst intriguing and requiring some thought never felt out of our capability. This is a turn up for the books in our experience because often you can be caught up in something that is so complex that without some kind of hint, you cannot move on. This makes for no fun at all and so whilst the level of difficulty is probably medium, it is enough to keep you interested long enough to complete it.
Get into…On circus grounds overall thoughts
I love these kind of things. Solving mysteries and puzzles feels like being able to live another life where you get to be a detective for the day. We’ve tried well known makes such as Exit games and even ones spanning a whole year where you receive information month on month.
So I feel like I am well positioned to review this kind of experience.
This was a WOW kind of experience. It might only last a few hours but the amount of detail and puzzle packed into this experience is immense.
Like I said before, this is beautifully presented with high quality components. The attention to detail is extremely impressive and I love how all the elements link together. Unlocking one part of the puzzle will help you to see something new in another part of the documentation.
This is the first time I have truly felt like a detective solving a crime, where I felt confident that given enough time and inclination, I could solve it on my own or with my fellow gaming group without the need to look up hints. At no point did I want to give up, the components and story unravel keeping you hooked.
I might have even gone to bed puzzling out in my head what was going on before carrying on with the puzzle the next day.
It is definitely easy to delegate evidence to different people to puzzle over and so it makes for a great one to complete with others; all drawing upon each others findings to piece the story together.
This experience feels like it is made with love by people who enjoy this kind of puzzle adventure and you can tell that it is well thought out and imagined. I love that you can reset the experience by buying a reset pack from Studio stamp website. This is in start contrast to the Exit games which are one and done and we definitely want to share this experience with as many people as we can because it is so awesome.
We were really excited that we got to review this experience and absolutely loved it. Can’t rave about this enough!
