Escape room series Exit: The Game has now sold over four million copies

Escape-room-in-a-box series Exit: The Game has shifted over four million copies since Markus and Inka Brand’s puzzle board games debuted in 2016, publisher Kosmos has announced.

The Exit series launched in Germany and Italy in 2016, followed by the first trilogy of standalone escape-room puzzles – The Pharaoh’s Tomb, The Secret Lab and The Abandoned Cabin – coming out in English the following year.

Exit: The Game earned the Brands a nomination for the 2017 Spiel des Jahres prize (they were ultimately bested by Kingdomino), before being quickly followed by a second trilogy set on a Forgotten Island, Polar Station and Forbidden Castle. 

Plenty more Exit sequels have followed, including diving to the bottom of the sea in The Sunken Treasure and indulging in an Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery in Dead Man on the Orient Express – our personal favourite of the lot.

In a tweet celebrating the series’ success, Kosmos said that, according to market analysts at Eurotoys and NPD Group Germany, Exit: The Game was the ‘strongest game brand in terms of sales in euros for the first half of 2019’. Tabletop Gaming has contacted Eurotoys and NPD to clarify the statistic and get some further information – we’ll update this story as necessary.

The publisher also revealed that the entire series has collectively sold over four million games around the world.

Each Exit game is a standalone experience that lasts around an hour to 90 minutes. Although each box only costs £13 or so, many of the Exit games can only be played once, requiring the players to destroy, write on or cut up components inside the box (and sometimes the box itself) to complete the series of puzzles and escape each game’s locked room.

Still, we’ve found the puzzles to be well worth the investment. Which is good, because it seems like there’ll be plenty more to come.

WOW!😱 Die Marke "#EXIT – Das Spiel" belegt im ersten Halbjahr 2019 Platz 1 der stärksten Spielemarken nach Umsatz in € von Januar bis Juni 2019.* Weltweit haben sich die EXIT Spiele bereits über 4 Millionen Mal verkauft.
*Quelle: Eurotoys/npd group Deutschland, Teilmarkt Spiel pic.twitter.com/8PHeK3yZ90

— KOSMOS Verlag (@KOSMOS_Verlag) August 27, 2019