Lucardo – Virginia House

Lucardo – Virginia House.
Location: Manchester
Game Date – 28/02/2017.
Team: Amy & Ian

Yay! Back to Lucardo after too long a hiatus. Lucardo are one of my favourite companies, we’ve always had a great time there and they put out great, well decorated logical games! We were so glad to be going back, this time for Virgina House.

Theme:
“A serial killer is on the loose. Every hour, on the hour for the past 24 hours a murder has taken place. The killer has been leaving clues around the murder scenes, sending Scotland Yard around in circles. Your team has been granted access to the murder scene and is tasked with cracking the clues, riddles and puzzles to track down the next location before the murderer strikes again. An innocent life depends on you”

Theming in Virgina House was excellent, the murder scene happened to be a house, and this was reflected perfectly in the decoration, even down to patio doors within the house!
Very cleanly decorated (I LOVE this about Lucardo’s rooms, they’re clean, well decorated and don’t over-clutter their rooms) it was simple, yet very effective. There was a fair bit of time spent in the dark playing with torches, and whilst we were glad when the lights came on, the lack of lights and torches were perfectly on theme.
Lucardo always deliver a great story to their rooms, and the game hosts become part of the story too.
This carries through into the clue system, and gives the room more immersion.
Immersion is good, even though there is a standard of padlocks in the Lucardo rooms, they merge excellent immersion and great puzzles with excellent story and theming to create a brilliant all round escape room.

Game Play:
A fairly open room to start, which (by the way we played it, by working on 1 puzzle at a time) felt linear. Linearity closed in during the latter half of the game, leaving us with a clear direction of where we were going and what puzzles we had to solve.
The puzzles were excellent in this room, with a good cross-section but NO MATHS! Which was a welcome relief. There was a bias towards observation but there were also word, logic, team-work and physical puzzles too. The inclusion of tech was great in the room, as an aid to solving puzzles.
The flow of the room was fantastic, with every puzzle giving a satisfying conclusion with a great Ah-ha moment. We only stalled at the 2nd to last puzzle, as this was purely us overthinking and getting trapped in only seeing one solution to the puzzle!
I would wholeheartedly recommend this room to small groups of enthusiasts (the room is so logical bigger groups of enthusiasts will fly through so take less people to ramp up the difficulty) Bigger groups of newbies would love this room as a great 4th or 5th room, a little experience will help in Virginia House!

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a screen (from the game host in the “surveillance” van!)

Game Host:
Jack was our Game Host and he was great. Very friendly and has a clear love for the job, had it been quieter we could have stayed and chatted for a lot longer! He ran our game very well, only giving clues when really needed and letting us mull everything over before he sent those clues. Excellent Game Hosting!

Did we escape?
Yes, in 57 minutes (due to our over-thinking on THAT puzzle!)

Website: https://lucardo.com/
Price:
2 Players £40
3 Players £54
4 Players £68
5 Players £80