The Best Escape Room Board Games

If you’re looking for the best escape room board games, look no further. My husband and I have done over 100 different escape rooms and played a ton of escape room board games at home, and these are the ones that give you a similar puzzle solving, adrenaline pumping experience.

Plus, we’ve included our recommendations for our favorite escape room board game for each age group, experience you’re looking for, and budget!

the best escape room board games at home

I’m what you’d call an escape room addict. We’ve done pretty much all of the escape rooms in Kansas City where we live, all The Escape Game games across the country (literally all of them), and we do escape rooms on almost every trip we go on. We even did one on my most recent trip to Germany that I highly do not recommend but that’s a story for another day.

We may even have a spreadsheet with all the escape rooms we’ve done. Just maybe.

I’ve always been an avid game and puzzle person, my husband’s a lawyer and logic nerd, so escape rooms are just a natural fit for us. As much as I love going and actually physically being locked in a room, I know it’s not feasible to do all the time. For one, escape rooms can be expensive – especially if you’re required to book out an entire room to have a private experience.

Since weekly escape rooms aren’t an option, we’ve also amassed quite the collection of escape room board games to play at home. Or games that have similar concepts to escape rooms with puzzles, mystery solving, and more.

There are the escape room board games we recommend spending money on and at the bottom there’s a small section of ones we’ve tried and would skip the next time.

Escape Room Board Games for Adults

While technically you could probably have teens and sometimes even kids help with these, they’re geared more toward adults with their puzzles, storylines, and content so I’d err on the side of older teens and adults for these ones.

Murder Mystery Party Case Files Game

While not technically an escape room, this murder mystery case files game felt more like an escape room experience than a lot of the games in this list. I shared an entire video about our experience doing this one, but it was just so much fun.

They give you an entire folder full of evidence that you have to use to solve the mystery. We did the Death by Chef’s Knife case and everything was well thought out, organized, and eventually led us to the killer, but not too early. My husband and I had a great time with this one and already bought another!

Escape the Room

My husband was a big fan of this one because of the number of puzzles it included. It was written like you were in an actual escape room with different places you had to get open (by completing puzzles) and each of those places had more puzzles inside.

This one made me think more than some of the other escape room board games on this list but in a good way. I love that it included reading puzzles, hands-on puzzles, and even logic puzzles you had to work through. It also felt a bit more like a non-linear escape room because multiple puzzles could be worked on at the same time rather than a very linear do A then B kind of feeling.

The other thing that was great was you had the opportunity once you escaped to complete a few more additional puzzles if you still had time left. Some of my favorite escape rooms add bonus puzzles for extra time, so I thought that was a fun idea!

Escape Room Board Games for Teens

Many of these have the age range of 10+ but for me I feel like they had puzzles that you would need someone older than that to at least be part of the group, so I’m calling these escape room board games for teens. You can absolutely have your kids help with these, I just don’t think they’ll necessarily be able to work through them on their own.

Escape Room in a box

I played Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment with my multi-generational family and all six of us playing were heavily involved in solving all of the puzzles throughout the game. And we totally could’ve had up to eight people doing things because puzzles were sitting around waiting to be looked at.

The other thing I absolutely loved about Escape Room in a Box is that not only were there your typical paper puzzles (crosswords, fill in the blanks, etc.) they actually had a number of physical puzzles as well that made it feel more like an actual escape room experience.

The one thing to note is that because this is an older game, it is a bit more expensive than some of the other ones on this list but it’s definitely more of a hands on experience.

Unlock! Games

There are actually a bunch of Unlock! for Kids that are great or the younger set but in general I feel like teens and adults will be able to appreciate these ones more as they can get a bit tricky.

There are a bunch of different Unlock! games. Each one comes with three different puzzles inside and I use the term puzzles loosely. Basically it’s a deck of cards that you have to look at, use together, and figure out the mysteries of to get through it. There is definitely a learning curve to doing Unlock! games but once you’ve figured out generally how they work, you may get addicted.

We did and ended up buying a ton of the different variations. There’s everything from historical to theme parks and even a Star Wars Unlock!

You can see all the Unlock! sets here but if you want some of the most popular ones to start with, these are always favorites:

• Heroic Adventures – Sherlock Holmes, In Pursuit of White Rabbit, and a video game inspired one
• Timeless Adventures – The Noside show, Arsene Lupin and the Great Diamond, and Lost in the ChronoWarp
• Extraordinary Adventures – Restart, Hollywood Confidential, and the W.A.F.F. Odyssey
• Legendary Adventures – Action Story, Dead or Alive, and the Case of the Burnt Angels

Exit the Game

There are a bunch of different variations of these, but the one we did most recently was The Haunted Roller Coaster. It was kind of a mixture of Unlock! with a deck of cards and Escape the Room! with its puzzle wheel and extra pieces that go with the game.

I thought this one was well put together, the storyline progressed seamlessly, and the puzzles all made sense. I don’t love when you have to make some pretty big jumps to figure things out, and this one was pretty straightforward. It felt like a pretty simple escape room with linear puzzles leading you down the path.

This is one of the cheapest in the bunch and similar to Unlock! if you put things back together how they came, you can replay this one as well. It’s a great option if you want something your family can do together!

These are some of the most popular Exit the Game options available:

• The Circus Mystery
• The Enchanted Forest
• The Magical Academy

Exit: Advent Calendar

escape Room Board Games for Kids

I’ll be honest, we don’t do a lot of these because my youngest isn’t interested and my oldest would prefer to do one of the games above. But we have tried a few that were enjoyable, so I’ve included those below if you want ones that are actually designed for kids.

Unlock! Kids

I mentioned already that we love Unlock! games and the kid ones are a lot of fun because they use kid-friendly themes and the puzzles are much easier. They also take a lot less time, which is great when kids are involved. I will say though that even though they’re promoted as for kids, I still recommend having a teen or adult around to help them when they get stuck. Some of the puzzles can still be a bit tricky.

Each of the kids sets includes three different stories with two different adventures in each, so they still can fill a good amount of time if you do both!

The most popular kids sets are:

• Stories from the Past – Ancient Egypt, The Wild West, and Prehistoric Times
• Legendary Stories – Mayan City, Heart of Africa, and Olympus
• Detective Stories – Castle, Theme Park, and Barnyard

Escape Your House Spy Team

If you want something that feels the most like an experience of an actual escape room, Escape Your House is a fun one for the entire family to do together. It comes with six different scenarios that you setup in your actual house. They’re only about fifteen minutes long, which is great for younger kids.

escape Room Board Game We Don’t Recommend

We’ve done a handful of games that we personally didn’t love, and I’ll share and explain those below. Not to say these aren’t fun games, we just didn’t like them. They might be a great fit for you and your family.

Escape Room

This one is designed to be used as an escape room you setup for a party, but I’m really glad I didn’t do that because neither my husband or I enjoyed this one at all.

The particular one we did was set in London. I love a good destination escape room, but it felt like knowledge of London was required AND you literally had to look up things on your phone throughout the solve the puzzles. One of the clues is a quiz with all sorts of trivia about London, we knew like 2 out of 12 answers. You also have to use Google Maps to find things and just jump to a lot of conclusions.

We still have a bunch of other escape room board games to try out so make sure to bookmark or save this post to come back later once we’ve added the others!

And if you like board games, I highly recommend checking out these posts as well!

• Board games for adults – these ones are more strategic or longer games or just ones that adults will enjoy more than the kids! Also great for teens!
• Board games for kids – these aren’t just games for kids to play, they’re ones that you’ll actually want to play with the kids!
• Board games for large groups – have a big group and want to play a game? These ones are designed for groups of eight and up!
• Most popular board games – I asked my million social media followers for their favorite board games and these were their responses!
• Family card games – think board games but in card form, these are some of the most fun ones out there!