Dispatch is a monthly "subscription-based mystery" from Breakout Games that "tests your detective skills each month with a new delivery of clues."
This is a review of the third series called I, Spy:
"By some twist of fate you have been mistaken for the top secret agent known as Wolf. Now you’ve been sent an assignment to stop the assassin known as The Raven from acquiring and using a nuclear device. You’ll track The Raven down with the help of a mysterious friend and use spy craft to ultimately sabotage the nuclear threat. Can you track down The Raven in time?"
This box was sent to us at no cost for review. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
About Dispatch: On The Run by Breakout Games
The Subscription Box: Dispatch
The Cost: $24.99 a month + free shipping
ACTIVE DEAL: Save $10 off your first box!
CODE: dispatchsignup10
The Products: Physical clues to help solve a mystery.
Ships to: USA
Dispatch I, Spy by Breakout Games #1 Review
I love that the boxes for this subscription are always so interesting and add to the mystery of the game!
We received a little intro card complete with a checklist on the back, which is incredibly helpful when there are clues everywhere and you never know what you might be missing.
In case we need any help along the way, we received this card from Bailey Detective Co. with a link to their website where we can email for help if we get stuck.
Since we'll be traveling, we need a passport of course. This one looks authentic and the pages appear to be blank, but with this box, you never know when a clue might appear.
We also received this envelope full of cash. Too bad it isn't real, although it does look and feel somewhat authentic, not of the Monopoly money variety.
We received this Top Secret folder full of intel on the Raven, the assassin we are trying to stop. We only have this blurry photo of him and a feather, which is what he leaves behind at the scene of his crimes.
We also received a folder full of confidential information on a man named Sergei Kedrov, along with a photograph, and memo full of mysterious redacted information on something called Operation Businessman.
We received this book on Code Systems that is full of information about Morse Code, Braille, Navy flag signals and more.
They even included information on Baconian Ciphers and American Sign Language and left a space for notes.
The first bit of helpful information that we received was this letter telling us that we have been given an urgent assignment and that they received information prior to a friend's unfortunate accident and have made travel arrangements for us. They wished us luck, but what stuck out to me was the mention of a scratch from a coin. I decided to give it a go and grabbed a coin and started scratching at the white lines.
It revealed further information that the Raven was looking to purchase a suitcase nuclear device at any cost. The message also warned us that Agent Hollis who had been on the case before us had been murdered and that we were on our own. Things were about to get serious!
After reading the letter, I was drawn to this mysterious card that was found in Agent Hollis's pocket. It had a phone number on the back which I decided to call. After a few rings, I reached an automated message that provided me with some information. The gist of which was that I would be in the field with no backup and that I should take extra precaution as Kalbakastan is quite unstable at the moment. I needed to get in and out as quickly as possible without raising suspicion and I would be sent a local guide to show me around to all of the places I need to visit on my mission. The message provided a passphrase for when I meet the guide and also told me to trust no one. Very mysterious, indeed!
While I was busy taking down the information from the phone call, my husband was busy trying to decode this message from the last page of our codebook. The translation led us to a website where we were asked to input our passphrase, which was the information I had just received during my phone call. I love that our username is the latin form of The Wolf, which is our secret agent name for this mystery.
Once in, we realized it was a mail vault and there was a coded message waiting for us. The message contained an audio clip which we determined was in Morse code and we spent a good bit of time trying to figure it out. As you can see from our notes, morse code is NOT easy! By the end, it all started to sound the same, but eventually, we were able to solve it. I don't want to give too much away, but we did need to use some evidence from our box to find out the answer to the question we decoded.
We received this card in our box and it seems that our mysterious assassin seems has his own Instagram account. By checking his account, we were able to answer the question and a quick Google search of the information led me exactly where I needed to go.
The website brought us to what appeared to be an online casino game. We read the rules and were told we needed to get up to $20,000 in order to cash out. The game was a simulated one, so there was no real strategy to it, but it was fun to see the numbers change as we attempted to get to that $20,000. Once we did, we had the option to cash out so we could pay off our informant. This led us to a new passphrase for our mail vault.
We logged back in to our mailbox, but this time with our new passphrase. We saw that we now had a second coded message in our inbox. The message stated that it was from a phone call made by the Duchess, but that it got interrupted and cut off partway through. Much to our dismay, it was another audio clip with a Morse code message that was interrupted by what I thought was a train and what my husband thought sounded like rain. This one was so fast that it was really difficult to distinguish between the dots and dashes. Definitely more challenging than the first. After spending what felt like an embarrassingly long amount of time decoding the message, we finally realized it was simply a message letting us know to meet again in four weeks when our next installment arrives.
Verdict: This was such a fun and unique activity for my husband and me to work on together. It was definitely challenging and took up most of our evening, but I loved working together to solve these clues. It was a bit overwhelming at first with all of the information, but I liked that we had to sort through it and figure out where to start on our own. This was just enough of a challenge for us and I was a bit worried we wouldn't know where or how to stop, but it all went in a logical order that was pretty easy to follow once we got the hang of it. We still have a ton of information that we haven't even used yet, but it's exciting to see how it will all work together in the end! I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how this game progresses.
To Wrap Up:
Can you still get this box if you sign up today? This is the first box in the I, Spy game series. Although everyone receives a new box each month, subscribers will receive different boxes depending on where they are in the story.
Coupon - Use code dispatchsignup10 to save $10 off your first box!
Value Breakdown: This box is the first in a series of five total boxes each costing $24.99 for a total of $124.95 for the series. Considering this box gave us a full evening of solid entertainment, I definitely think this was worth the experience! Using it as a date night activity was fun and also much less expensive than going out!
Check out all of our Dispatch reviews and the Geek + Nerd Subscription Box Directory for more mystery and crime-themed boxes!
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What do you think of the first installment of I, Spy?
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