Escape Rooms come to Puzzles!
We’ve reviewed a bunch of Escape Room type board games and even included a number of them in our 2019 Board Game Gift Guide.
Well, we’ve got a new twist on Escape Room games for you today — Escape Puzzles!
We first heard about Escape Puzzles from Ravensburger a few months ago and just attempted our first one last week. And I had a lot of fun doing it!
I’ve always enjoyed putting together puzzles and typically put together one or two a year around the holidays. I like diving into 1,000 or 2,000 piece puzzles while listening to audiobooks during a handful of evenings over a few weeks.
So during a quiet Sunday afternoon last week, I decided it was time to attempt one of the latest Ravensburger Escape Puzzles — Witch’s Kitchen.
We turned on the Christmas music and I dove into it!
How Escape Puzzles work
“On a woodland walk you discover delicious mushroom and take a tiny bite … Your world starts to spin and you realize that the mushrooms are poisonous! You stagger along, fall into a large hollow, and find yourself in a witch’s woodland kitchen. Can you find an antidote and save yourself? Piece together the 759 pieces and solve the hidden riddles to save your life!”
That’s the set up for Escape Puzzle – Witch’s Kitchen and it explains exactly what to do. You put together the puzzle and then discover and solve the challenges hidden within.
Like a normal puzzle, your goal is to put together all the pieces to make a picture.
However, unlike a normal puzzle, the picture doesn’t exactly match the artwork on the cover of the box!
But don’t be afraid of that. Because most of the puzzle does match the box art just fine.
It’s just that there are places where the details in the puzzle differ slightly from the box art.
Now, I don’t want to give away any big spoilers, so I won’t spill the bean on everything. But I will let you know some examples of differences.
The most noticeable for us as soon as we started piecing the puzzle together was the cat missing from the stool at the front of the picture. On the box cover, there’s a cat sitting on a cloth-covered stool. But the cat is gone in the puzzle — revealing the top of the stool with a star pattern and lots of numbers. There are also a couple of blanks (or scratched out numbers) that you’ll have to solve in order to find the antidote.
As further examples, rolled-up parchments on the box cover are open in the puzzle, drawers are open, numbers are on bottle labels, and hidden symbols appear in strange places.
Once the puzzle is complete, you work to solve the mental challenges and find a solution.
The Escape Puzzle also comes with a solution inside a sealed envelope. So once you think you’ve found a final solution, you can open the envelope and check to see if you’re right.
The game also includes a QR Code that you can scan which takes you to a website where clues are available for each challenge within the puzzle. So if you do get stuck on solving one, you can look at some of the hints.
Can the whole family enjoy Escape Puzzles?
Puzzles can be a great activity to either do solo or together. And these Escape Puzzles are no different. You could go at it alone, or with family.
And colorful puzzles are also very attractive to kids.
Even though there are differences in the artwork and the final puzzle, they aren’t different enough to get frustrated with. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
All the differences make putting the puzzle together lots of fun!
That’s because you’ll be looking closely at each piece as you place them, you’ll already know some of the secrets hidden within by the time you finish the puzzle. For example, when we put together the pumpkin and saw a hidden equation, we knew we’d be in for some code breaking soon.
We spent time on putting together the puzzle over the course of 4 evenings. We didn’t track the exact time it took because we put it together casually as we talked about our days, had dinner, and did other things around the house. But I’d estimate we spent about 7 hours putting it together.
Once complete, the challenge is to zero in on the clues, how they relate to one another, and solve each challenge.
In the Witch’s Kitchen, there were 8 such challenges. And they were easy to zero in on because we’d already seen so much while placing the pieces.
This is where young kids may get frustrated — in trying to solve the challenges.
Yet for older kids and adults, they present a fun mental challenge.
In the Witch’s Kitchen there’s a bit of code-breaking, pattern matching, and math. All things I enjoy!
How do Escape Puzzles score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?
Like many escape room type games, once you’ve solved it, it’s hard to repeat the joy of discovery. While this may still be the case for us with Witch’s Kitchen — where solving the hidden puzzles may not pose a challenge — we still have a fun puzzle we can put together again.
We give a big thumbs up to Ravensburger’s Escape Puzzle Witch’s Kitchen and would love to try more.
After all, there are many Escape Puzzles to choose from:
We’d like to thank Ravensburger for a review copy of Escape Puzzle Witch’s Kitchen.
This is an interesting idea. Back in the day, I “played” a few of the mystery puzzles that were out there. I suspect it’s a similar sort of thing where after putting the puzzle together you reference parts of the image against something in the rule/story book. I feel like this one might be a little more engaging since it’s puzzle based (the mystery story felt a little contrived/forced to me).
Thanks for the review.
Okester – I’ve done a few of those too and this Escape Puzzle has been different. There isn’t any reference to the rulebook at all with what you find in the puzzle. They’re all standalone puzzles to decipher. The results of each mini-puzzle then refer to other elements found in the puzzle to zero in on the final solution.
Instructions to Exit Puzzle Space Station 759 have been lost.
Where can I get a copy. The solution envelope is still here.
Janet – Your best option is to contact Ravensburger Customer Support: https://www.ravensburger.us/service/contact-us/index.html