There have been innumerable escape-room-in-a-box puzzle games and there have been some games where the innovation is that you learn the rules as you go; Friedemann Friese has particularly pioneered the latter with his range of small-box developing rule games. With Unboxed, Jordan Sorenson has come up with something new: a puzzle game where you are working together to discover the rules.
The premise in Unboxed, from WizKids, is that you are archaeology interns helping to sort the finds of a series of archaeological digs. The 10 digs have discovered the components for ancient board games but the rules have perished. Your job is to take each set of components and come up with the rules for the games. It's possibly not best archaeological practice that the lead archaeologist has already given a title to each game to help direct the interns but it works in terms of Unboxed game play. If you're scoring then you'll need to correctly answer the specific questions posed for each of the games but the real joy of Unboxed is in the discussion, argument and maybe trial and error as the players debate the components and clues to piece together these faux ancient games.
Unboxed is notionally a 1-4 player game, and you can tackle it as a solitaire puzzler, but you'll enjoy it more with at least two players bouncing ideas and suggestions back and forth. If you want to push the number of players up to five or six, there's really nothing stopping you.
To minimise spoilers we've just shown in our Board's Eye View 360 the components for the first game. The 10 games are all quite different and there's a distinct progression in difficulty as you work through them all. If you find yourselves stumped, there are more clues available, tho' if you're scoring then taking advantage of the hints will reduce your score. From our Board's Eye View plays, we reckon that it's maybe just children playing Unboxed who will want to take up the hints.
And you don't need to stop there. Even when you've worked out the core rules, you may well enjoy refining them further to develop and improve the game, as in Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time (Fail Faster).