Puzzle Post: The Disappearance | Review

Puzzle Post The Disappearance Review | Uncover the mystery behind Dr. Carter’s disappearance. With shadowy forces intent on silencing her groundbreaking findings in the icy Arctic, it’s up to you to piece together the truth before Dr Carter, and her discoveries, are gone forever.

Date Played: March 2024
Time Taken: ~50 Minutes
Number of Players: 2
Difficulty: Easy-Medium

Puzzle Post are one of those staples of the “puzzle” section of all my local board game shops… And book shops… Stationary shops… And occasional supermarkets too, for that matter. And I can’t help but feel a little proud, because I’ve been following and playing their games since the very beginning. I love seeing how far Bobbie, Will and the team have taken Puzzle Post.

So this month I was extra excited to hear they’ve brought out not one but two brand new games – The Disappearance and The Secret Set. These two games join Puzzle Post’s Dinner Party Games collection, which are styled as more narrative tabletop games. Unlike the company’s earlier and personalised titles, which can be customised with your own message at the end, the dinner party games follow a fixed story.

In The Disappearance, that story is as follows:

Deep within the Arctic Circle the abrupt disappearance of Dr. Carter throws the research station into disarray. There are rumours Dr. Carter was onto something, that she’d discovered something she shouldn’t have, and was trying to make it out of there with the information in fact. Unfortunately for you, all she left behind were a series of cryptic notes and a locked vault.

To uncover the mystery, I was tasked with unlocking the vault. This, like all Puzzle Post experiences, was an online portal locked with 9 numbers anywhere from 1-100 in a particular order. Each item in the envelope, alone or in combination with others would hide one of those numbers, and it was up to me to follow the threads, find the numbers, and open the vault.

One of the really cool things about Puzzled Post is that in each envelope you get two copies of everything. This means that even though some of the items in each game are fairly destructible (picture folding / cutting / and so on), you’ve got a second copy if you wanted to gift it on. Or conversely if you do play with a large group of people, more than one person can look at the same item at the same time. It’s a nice touch.

Of the materials in The Disappearance, everything is themed around an arctic mission, and it’s exactly the sort of things you might expect to find spread out on the desk of an arctic researcher. There were some print outs of seismic data, a photograph of the Northern Lights, a map of the Arctic Circle, a report on temperature monitoring trends, a pamphlet about why seismic blasting was bad… And so on, and so on. In all, 11 unique pieces in the envelope, and 9 puzzles hidden among them to solve.

In terms of gameplay it was fun. Nothing groundbreaking or significantly differing from any other Puzzle Post experience, so if you’ve played any of the company’s earlier games you’ll know what to expect. The puzzles themselves were straightforward, well signposted, but ultimatly pulled their punches in terms of uniqueness or risk taking. Which is fine, especially considering Puzzle Post is more targetted at the mass market audience than enthuasiasts who might play these regularly, but again I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself because I did.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the “arctic exploration” trope in puzzle games. Escape Mail over in Canada has a Shackleton themed game in partial to, and I personally worked on Curious Correspondence Club’s envelope game set on an old shipbreak embedded deep in the arctic ice. It’s an environment ripe for exploring from a puzzle perspective, and I’m excited that Puzzle Post chose it as the theme for their latest.

Normally I play Puzzled Post games with friends, but this time I decided to tackle the game by myself. This was due to a combination of being jetlagged after long travel, and being way too excited to wait for my puzzle buddies to come over and play with me. The game worked really well for just a solo player, and I was able to complete the whole thing thoroughly without using any hints – although if you do need a hint, the hint system is pretty robust and thorough.

On their website, Puzzle Post recommends anything from the dinner party collection to be good for a group of up to 8 people. Honestly I think more than 3 would probably be pushing it, but in theory there’s no reason you couldn’t spread out all the puzzles and tackle them individually in a larger group. In any case, my own dining table can only fit about 6. Maybe 7 if we repurpose an office chair.

In all, I’d recommend this game for just about anyone – enthusiasts looking for something light and entertaining, or puggles (puzzle muggles) looking for a high quality, well signposted game with a fun theme to sink their teeth into. I probably didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did with their earlier games, though it’s hard to say if that’s because I’ve personally changed in the 5 or so years since I first picked up a Puzzle Post, or if it’s because their style of gameplay has changed.

But one thing is for sure – Puzzle Post as a whole are reliably good, and this latest game in their collection lives up to that expectation nicely. There’s a reason they’ve been so successful over the years, and The Disappearance is a great reflection of the company.

Please note, we received our copy of The Disappearance for free with the expectation of a review. This has not affected the contents of our review.

If you’d like to purchase your own copy of The Disappearance, you can do so on Puzzle Post’s website here.