Byline: John Maher

In March, Terry Rolapp and Tommy Wallach of the escape room company Hatch Escapes were well on their way to launching their second escape room, The Ladder, in Los Angeles. Then the pandemic hit. But their cocreator on the project, Arvind Ethan David, the producer of BBC America's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and Broadway's Jagged Little Pill, wasn't ready to pack the partnership in. So they put their heads together on a new project: one that they could take, as David put it, "from genesis to delivery" while in lockdown and that could be enjoyed by anyone while safely at home or trapped there under quarantine.

The result of their brainstorming sessions, the forthcoming tabletop game Mother of Frankenstein, is pretty much the definition of out-of-the-box thinking (even though, like most tabletop games, it will come in a box). The game combines aspects of immersive theater, escape rooms, board games, puzzles, role-playing games, and parlor games in one package, making for a 15-hour playing experience; although the creators implore buyers to spread the game out over the course of a few nights-enjoy it like "fine wine, rather than a tequila shot," they say. And gamers, it seems, are hungry for just this kind of hybrid experience. The game was fully funded on Kickstarter in under 24 hours, and more than 1,470 backers have donated...