For some reason I thought fleeing an encroaching office fire would be less stressful than this.

Run for Your Lives!

Emergency Exit Only is a strange beast, a tile layer in which success or failure comes down to how good you are with spatial reasoning and memory. That will sound like a nightmare to some of you, and I get it. I can only assuage your concerns by emphasizing the degree to which this game is funny. Like That’s Not a Hat or the substantially more involved Galaxy Trucker before it, Emergency Exit Only is better when someone fails.

The goal is to get yourself to the end of an eternal, Severance-esque corridor, with a fire hot on your heels the entire time. You take turns adding a tile to the path, but the tiles are placed one atop the other. Only one is ever visible at any given time. Rather than seeing your path unfold before you, you are forced to picture it in your mind’s eye.

[caption id="attachment_327745" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Photo credited to @Olivier_Iello on BoardGameGeek.[/caption]

This means, rather inevitably, that mistakes will be made. If you think the path has hit a dead end, looped back onto itself, or that an otherwise invalid tile was played,…

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I play maybe a half dozen one-shot/escape room/murder mystery-style games a year. I’ve written so many reviews of these deduction titles that it’s hard to even remember them all at this point!

I know a winner when I see one, and on the heels of some of the best games to hit the market in this category with the entries from the KOSMOS Masters of Crime series, I am continuing to explore the market. I’m sure other publishers are making great titles here…right?

During my visit to Germany for SPIEL Essen 2025, I picked up a copy of My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey from the team at Horrible Guild. There’s no getting around it—the title of this game is terrible. I might have even said that to our friends at the publisher…”My Murder Mystery” is the name of the series? “A Dead Monkey”??? What is going on here? Even if some of this was lost in translation (Horrible Guild is an Italian publishing house), I still can’t figure out why they landed on “My Murder Mystery.”

(My 11-year-old heard the game’s title and was horrified by its implication: “do you have to investigate the murder of a MONKEY???”

Don’t sweat it. The title is terrible…but the game here is magic, and it instantly becomes a serious…

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