Throughout the pandemic, my family and I have been playing online games together. Sometimes we play Among Us, sometimes we play Codenames, but this weekend we got to try a new game altogether. Over the weekend, my family and I played Elfpossible by Puzzling Pursuits. It’s a game designed for 1 to 6 players, but with my family being the game lovers that they are we ended up playing with eight of us.
This Christmas themed game has a cute premise, delightful art, and an easy to use interface for each puzzle. The story behind the game is that there were twin boys born into a family business, which turns out to be delivering gifts on Christmas Eve. The younger twin turns out to have an abundance of Christmas spirit, while the older one grows up to be a bit of a Grinch. When the younger twin comes of age and takes over the role of Santa, the other twin begins a plot to ruin Christmas, And this is where we as players come in. Santa and his elves need YOUR help to bring joy back to the North pole and save Christmas.
Onto the puzzles themselves: There are five puzzles in total, and each one uses a different skill set. This meant that with a group of eight, we were each able to collaborate to solve the problems, and most of us experienced a breakthrough moment with at least one puzzle. The teddy bear puzzle did cause some slight drama, but we got there in the end!
This game would be interesting as a solo player – our family needed a couple of clues (provided on Puzzling Pursuits’ website!) to solve some of the puzzles, but I imagine that as a solo endeavour, this would be a head scratcher in a good way. The game does autosave as you go, so you could play your way through at your own pace and access the clues if you ran into a dead end. As a soloist, you also wouldn’t have seven other people yelling ideas at you which could be quite nice, but that’s more a reflection on my family’s dynamics than on the game itself!
The best part of playing Elfpossible was the sense of teamwork and accomplishment. Puzzling Pursuits does a great job of weaving a story that makes you want to solve the problem to save the day, and there was great satisfaction in beating the whole thing.
In the past, we have been to many escape rooms as a family or with friends, so Elfpossible was a nice way for us to feel some sense of normalcy in that regard. The puzzles were a good mix of challenging, and in total it took us about two hours to play through the whole thing. I recommend this game to anyone who is spending the holidays part from loved ones, as it was a really nice way to connect and put our heads together in the figurative sense, if not in the literal sense.
You can find Puzzling Pursuits online at puzzlingpursuits.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/puzzlingpursuits.
As always, we love adding some Christmas cheer to our holiday series, so today let’s Muppet things up with CeeLo Green’s All I Need Is Love: