Date Box is a monthly subscription box designed to make date night simple! Each month’s box is themed and has what you need for a date night with snacks to make together, a couple’s activity, and a Spotify playlist to enjoy throughout the whole process.
Each date is designed to bring couples together, help you capture memories, and really connect. You can click here to see some examples of their boxes.
The Subscription Box: DateBox
The Cost: $34.95/month, with discounts available for longer commitments (31.45/month with 3-month prepay, or $27.96/months for 6-months prepay). Shipping is $5 per month.
The Products: A monthly themed box designed to facilitate a unique date night for couples, including snacks and treats to make together, an activity, and a Spotify playlist to play throughout your night!
Ships to: U.S.
Check out the Date Night Subscription Box Directory and make sure to add DateBox to your subscription list or wishlist!
The first thing I pulled out of my box was an info booklet.
Inside was a little table of contents – I love that they had everything so thorough so I knew exactly where to look for whatever I needed.
The box I received this month was about Unity and coming together as a team. The activity this month was an at-home Escape Room! I can’t tell you how excited I was when I saw that because Escape Rooms are totally up our alley. Luke’s done one with his brothers before but I haven’t had the chance yet.
The general structure of the date involved setting the mood with the Spotify Playlist, making the snacks, talking it up with some conversation starters they provide, then playing the escape game and making memories by taking pics along the way!
Included was instructions and tips for the escape room game, titled “The Cruise Ship Escape.”
The snacks included were caramel apples, apple cider, and kettle corn!
Alpine Instant Spiced Apple Cider – 2 packs, Value $1.20 (buy a box of 10 packs for $6.71 on Amazon)
For instant cider, this was actually really good! I’ve never had instant cider, and I thought it tasted better with some mulling spices I had on hand. They gave suggestions for dressing them up with booze or whip cream (the latter being our choice).
Concord Foods Caramel Apple Kit – Value $8.25
I was emailed a couple days before my box arrived, letting me know I would need apples on hand. This kit makes 10 caramel apples! That’s a lot for one date night for two people. Personally, I knew I wouldn’t like to eat caramel-covered apples, so we decided to just slice the apples and use this as a dip instead.
To make the dip, you mix this packet with 2.5 cups sugar and 8 oz of milk on the stove. The instructions called for use of a candy thermometer, which I didn’t have. I’ve never made a caramel on the stove before.
The recipe seemed simple enough, but it didn’t turn out. The flavor was good but the texture was a little runny and never smoothed out. I’m sure it’s something I did but I can’t rule out the kit, either. It worked out okay, though.
The other snack was a baggie of popcorn with some sugar packets to help me make kettle corn. I didn’t end up using the packets so I don’t know if they measured out to what the recipe called for – I just used my own sugar since it was more convenient.
I never knew kettle corn was so easy to make! I guess I’ve never tried, though. My family has always made popcorn on the stove in a pot with hot oil, so I felt totally comfortable doing the same with this recipe. You just add sugar, and I used coconut oil to pop it in.
(I’m glad that “picking out the burnt pieces” was actually included as one of the steps, because I totally had to do that.)
Here’s our snack spread! We topped the cider with whip and some of the caramel sauce.
Now, onto my favorite part of the whole box – the Cruise Ship Escape!
The escape game included a little info booklet, a notepad, 2 pencils, and 3 numbered envelopes.
The print was very tiny, but the premise was printed on the first envelope. To summarize, you two are on a vacation on a cruise ship when pirates attack. The captain gets shot by the pirates and you’re taken to help since you have been an EMT for 10 years apparently. However, for some reason, instead of giving clear instructions on how to use the radios to call for help the captain decides to leave clues and codes that you and your partner have to decipher.
After you’ve read the synopsis, you log onto DateBox.com/escape and access the timer. This is a really cool part of the game – once you start, the timer is locked to your IP address so you can’t just refresh the page or use a different device to restart the clock. It keeps counting even when you browse away from the page! This page is also where you enter your code guesses and it tells you if you’re right or wrong – but you lose time for every wrong guess. As time passes, clues also pop up under the timer.
Each envelope had a different sheet with a puzzle and codes to find – I was happy to find that it was challenging, especially the first part. It felt like we were left trying to figure out where to even begin and what to find, but with everything right in front of us if we thought hard enough - which is how Luke said real escape games felt like. You were given an hour to finish the game, and we made it even with accidentally starting the (un-pausable) timer before we had read the synopsis, which effectively gave us about an 8-minute penalty. If you finish within the hour, you enter your email and you’re submitted into a drawing to win free DateBoxes.
I don’t know what happens if you don’t finish within an hour… I hope that they let you keep playing and entering codes so you can finish the date, just disqualify you from the prize.
The Verdict: Luke and I had a ton of fun with our first DateBox! Everything was right up our alley – the snacks, the game, and I even loved the playlist! Which I have to say was also a really cool aspect of the night because it started with sweet, romantic music and evolved into some suspenseful Hanz Zimmer music while you’re working on the game! We are definitely excited for more DateBoxes in the future, and we feel like it was successful with making date night easy. We fit it in after the baby went to sleep and I really felt like we connected and had some great quality time working on something together. The only thing that we weren’t in love with was the conversation questions – they were things like, “how are you two better together than apart?” which was good but then the next question was “What ways do you make your partner better, and vice versa?” which felt redundant to us. I still liked the questions but they felt repetitive and didn’t facilitate very long of a conversation.
The whole thing felt well-developed and professional. I definitely recommend this for couples! I think it was great for us and worth the $34 price, especially since it made date night easy enough that we didn’t need to go out or get a sitter. I’m excited to see future themes and date boxes.
What do you think about DateBox?
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