Kulkmann's G@mebox - www.boardgame.de

echoes - The Dancer

[echoes - The Dancer]

Authors:
Dave Neale, Matthew Dunstan

Publisher:
Ravensburger
2021

No. of Players:
1-6

EVALUATION

[Complexity]
[Design]
[Interaction]
[Strategy]
[Evaluation]


G@mebox author Ralf Togler writes about the game:

Imagine you and your wife are buying a beautiful old Scottish manor. Proudly you move into the old house, and then you are confronted with a ghost of a young girl and your dream is over. There is one last hope: you can engage a group of detectives (or better boardgamers) who unravel the secret of the young lady to free her from her curse.

That’s more or less the background story of The Dancer, the first title of the new series echoes from RAVENSBURGER. The series sets new standards to the puzzle and riddle mechanisms in today’s deduction games. Players are asked to sort 24 objects, six of these objects representing chapters. The rest of the objects must be assigned to these chapters (three objects to each chapter), and then all has to be assembled in the right order. When players succeeded the whole story of the unlucky girl is unfolded, and the ghost finally finds peace.

[Echoes – The Dancer]

Click on image to enlarge!

The new standard in this game is that each object is linked to an audio echo. This can be a sound, for example someone walking a passage, an extract of a song or a scrap of conversation. But how can you hear the noise? Easy enough, I’m pretty sure there will be some mobile phones or tablets at the table, won’t there? Indeed, you will use an app and the camera of the mobile device to scan the objects. This works pretty well and soon after you will hear the sound that belongs to the object.

If you are sure about a chapter, you use the app again to solve. The app will tell you if you are right or if there are still mistakes in the story. Chapter after chapter must be assembled. In the end you are asked to find the right order of the chapters. And all of this simply by listening to the noises in the echoes.

[Echoes – The Dancer]

Click on image to enlarge!

echoes – The Dancer turned out to be a great amusement for me and my wife for about an hour. The story is well spoken by professional speakers, and it is a joy to listen to all that echoes. Although the theme is slightly worn out (a ghost in some Scottish manor), we had fun to find out more and more about the mistery. The level of difficulty is moderate, for escape pros maybe even easy, but I deem it appropriate for this kind of game. The game is not designed to be a brainkiller (then you probably would be forced to rehear the sounds over and over again), but to entertain.

An easy audio-puzzle for a nice evening. Unfortunately, there is no replayability at all unless you are a very oblivious person or you put the game away for a long time after playing it. But, much better, you can give the game away as a present to the next person as nothing is destroyed or depleted. Bad for the publisher, but good for you! By the way, the echoes series runs up to more and more titles. Four titles are available at the moment, but more are announced already…


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