Wish You Were Here: A Postcard-Based Puzzle Experience

You have been sent five postcards by a mysterious criminal. Hidden in these cards are puzzles with clues to past crimes and perhaps a message for you.

The Enigma Emporium’s first puzzle game was originally funded through Kickstarter and is now available through their online store. The company promises to deliver narrative-based puzzle games at a reasonable price. At fifteen dollars Wish You Were Here is certainly inexpensive, but is it a satisfying brain teaser?

Gameplay

Wish You Were Here consists of five postcards which all arrive together in a black envelope. The envelope includes a website link for hints should you need them.

The game’s story is that you are a detective who received these postcards from a mysterious source. Each postcard has multiple puzzles to be solved on the front as well as the back. The postcards can be solved independently of each other but a story is also told from one postcard to the next.

Players need to do research and use the internet to solve the puzzles, as many of them are based in real facts such as history or science. The postcards never need to be torn up, destroyed, or defaced, so that at the end you are still left with the postcards to do with as you choose (pass them on to someone else, hang them, etc).

Review

As escape rooms and escape room board games have grown in popularity, so too have subscription boxes which include mysteries and puzzles for you to solve. Wish You Were Here has some of the feel of the former without the time restraint and is significantly cheaper than most subscription box-type mysteries out there.

The envelope it comes in says it is for one to five players, perhaps thinking that each player can take a different postcard to work on but you can easily play with a larger group as well. Since there is a lot of researching online and making notes and trying different things on pieces of notepaper, it’s easy for two or more players to work on the same card.

It goes without saying that the game is extremely portable. It’s also something you can pick up and work on for a little while and then set down again if you want to solve the puzzles solo. The postcards also look quite nice and are of a high quality and sturdy.

There is a wide range of different types of puzzles to be solved and it’s impressive how deep some of the puzzles go given the amount of space there is on each card. The designers have really packed the cards full while still keeping them visually appealing.

How long it’s going to take you to solve all the puzzles will certainly vary based on number of players and those players’ experience. You might be able to solve them in an evening, but we didn’t.

At fifteen dollars, Wish You Were Here is well worth the price for puzzle lovers. The story is also intriguing and you do want to learn more about it as you go. It’s clever, it’s well designed, and extremely well put together.

Pros: Great price for the amount of game, flexible player count, high quality components, well designed puzzles

Cons: Game length will vary

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.