Investigation games are plethora. But this week’s ones involve a sense rarely used in board games: hearing. It is Echoesour fun proposal of the week.
Echoes is not a single game, but a collection, consisting of three boxes at the moment. The principle and the rules are always the same, only the plot changes. In cooperation with the other players, you must discover what happened, thanks to your gift: you perceive noises and voices emanating from objects, the famous “echoes of the past”.
In The dancerthe ghost of a young girl haunts a dwelling in the Scottish moor. The Cocktail takes you into the dim glow of a New York speakeasy, a meeting place for the local underworld. The Eclipsefinally, projects you into the distant future, in a world in ruins, where humanity has returned to a primitive level of civilization following a mysterious event.
The material is always the same: maps, illustrating objects. Six of them are made of thick cardboard, and represent the beginning of each chapter. The eighteen others complete the above-mentioned chapters in groups of three.
You also necessarily need an application to play, to install on your phone or tablet. Thanks to it, after listening to the prologue of your story, you scan the cards one by one, and listen to what the object in question can reveal to you about the plot. It can be a sound, a noise, a voice, a dialogue, an atmosphere. In short, you have to listen. Note that if your device is not compatible with card recognition, each card also has a code to enter manually into the application. It’s just a little longer.
Here is a small example of the sound after scanning the card for this medal:
After having “listened” to the different objects, you try to solve the investigation. Don’t panic, we can’t lose in Echoes. It may just take a little longer to reach the ending.
First of all, you have to find the three cards to associate with each beginning of the chapter, always by scanning them with the application. The latter helps you by telling you, in case of error, how many cards do not belong to the chapter, but without specifying which ones. It is not enough to group them, they must also be arranged in chronological order. When a chapter is complete, you are entitled to a summary, with some additional sound elements to help you for the rest.
Finally, when all the chapters have been found, there is one last step to solve the investigation: put them all back in order. Then a summary epilogue closes the session.
Why play Echoes ?
The great originality ofEchoes obviously comes from the use of sounds to solve an investigation. In reality, it’s even the whole heart of the game: the cards are ultimately only used as a support to be linked to what we have heard to order the different sound clues.
Curious, but slightly skeptical at first, we were quickly won over by playing it!
First, the sounds, the voices, the sound effects, everything is very well rendered and well done. The actors and sound effects did their job well. The app is easy to use and card recognition works without hassle.
But above all, a necessary condition for making a good investigation game, the scenarios are successful. We want to move forward in the story and understand its end. Three boxes for the moment, three totally different themes. The danceris our favorite, but the other two are great too. The Eclipsealthough a little messier, with two directions that are not really related but which come together, nevertheless offers a very original theme for this type of game. In any case, we chained the three in one weekend.
The difficulty on the other hand is not very full-bodied. If you are a group of seasoned players in this type of game, you will have no difficulty in closing the investigations. Even if you are a beginner. Especially since we can’t “lose”: we necessarily reach the end, simply our end score is more or less good depending on our number of errors. We really play for the story and the originality of the gameplay . Obviously, once finished and the plot understood, you cannot play it again.
With a completely original way of playing, Echoes manages to stand out from other mystery games and thrill us, despite its lack of difficulty. The themes and stories are gripping, and the quality soundtrack helps to dive into them. The application indicates that a fourth box is already planned… we can’t wait!
- Echoesare games by Dave Neale and Matthew Dunstan
- Published by Ravensburger
- For 1 to 4 players from 14 years old
- For games of about 45 to 60 minutes
- For €10.50 at Philibert:
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