That's right! In fact, recently we've played a few.
And some of them are better than others, which led us to thinking, why don't we share our perspective on what makes a good escape game?!
Of course there are no right and wrong answers here, but from years of building experiential designs, we can say there are a few key ingredients to look for.
1. Hints - Players love being able to access hints, and when they're not available, frustration sets in. Not only do games need to have hints, but as we've learned, they need to have really good ones! Ideally, players don't use them, but this is a great fallback option. Tiered hints are really appreciated so players don't get the answer all at once. This is one thing we love about Society of Curiosities' games... lots of slowly progressing hints!
2. Layers - Players love combining different layers of information to feel smart; ourselves included! This is where the puzzling comes in. If you step back and think of it, it's kind of mean that the puzzle designer wouldn't just give it to you straight, but that's kind of the point! Can you "connect the dots" so to speak. And a good puzzle design will connect the dots in just the right way, leaving you feeling accomplished. We really like Hinks Gazette by Bluefish Games for this reason.
3. Use of the design - A great escape game makes use of its environment. The design of each item is both beautiful and functional! A great design will incorporate puzzle elements into throughout. I can remember one escape room I did that stumped me, they had a design in the stonework (it was Mayan themed) along the top of the room. It was subtle and high up so you didn't think to look there, but it was revealing a message as well as contributing to the theme. For this reason, we like Curious Correspondence Club.
4. Use of the body - it's one thing to crack a code in 2-D, but it's quite another to get your hands involved: cutting, folding, taping, etc. We love escape rooms for this reason because they are whole-body experience. It makes me think of DaVinci who talked about "corporalita" or the process of learning when the whole body is engaged. We believe there's a lot of good that comes from working with your hands and moving your body! But don't take our word for it... play an episode of Escape Mail (especially Episode 3!) and find out for yourself.
Escape Mail is like an escape room without locks
NO LOCKS, NO DOORS, NO ROOM. So… how is this an escape room, you ask?
Well, in order for something to be an escape room, it needs a few key ingredients:
Well, in Escape Mail, we’ve brought much of that same methodology to your home in the vehicle of a slim envelope.
[For Example... In Episode 5, you get to help JJ open a 300 pound safe as well as a Da Vinci style cryptex.]
Allow us to explain.
Plenty of Escape Mailers tell us that they play with others: friends, family, coworkers, and more.
In fact, just the other day we got an email from Matt who purchased episodes 9 and 10.
“A group of 6 of us have been playing your mobile escape rooms, they've been a lot of fun! We've only made it to number 6 so far but we're taking turns ordering them. 11 and 12 were my turn to purchase.”
This is very common!
Many people actually send one copy to themselves and another copy to friends and family in far-away places. They then open the envelopes together at the same time and play, sharing details through webcam.
Since we know that it takes teamwork to make the dream work, we design the puzzles with this reality in mind.
In every envelope, you’re going to find a variety of items, each with varying degrees of information, but each one useful. This way, everyone has something to hold, examine, (fold?!) etc, and pass to the next person.
For episodes that are more minimalistic, we’re ensured that the user is prompted to actually take apart multi-page documents in order for the singular spreads to be interacted with by multiple players.
Was that a spoiler? Kinda. But I think its important you know that we’re thinking of your group of 2-4 players while we design.
There’s no shortage of these in Escape Mail!
In fact, we would argue that what Escape Mail may lack in terms of physicality, we make up for in a wide array of codes.
We have scoured the depths of our knowledge [and then some!] to come up with clever ways of working the widest variety of puzzle types into a single narrative.
Staying true to our escape room roots, we also ask Escape Mailers to cut, fold, and do all sorta of curious things TO their package. That’s because physicality is in our blood.
Sitting and thinking is fun, but we love getting up and moving around. That’s why in Episode 3 we ask you to build a paper room, and in episodes 10, 11 and 12 we ask you to… well… we’ll leave out the mind-blowing spoilers for now.
But the point is, the puzzle solving aspect of an escape room is alive and well - and perhaps even enhanced - in Escape Mail.
Without a doubt, Escape Mail features one of the great escape room storylines you’ll find.
We challenge you to find another 12-episode escape room game that follows a single character through as many twists and turns and - oh no! - moments.
The beloved character in Season 1 is none other than JJ Fitzpatrick, your mysterious cousin.
Suspicious? Watch out! You might just end up trusting this lovable “Cuz”.
Remember our friend Matt? Well he went on to write: “I know I've enjoyed how each puzzle is a little different but they are all a part of the same story. It's helped keep us committed to finishing the story! I really enjoy the way you commit to creating a fun narrative for us to follow.”
Our commitment was born in the dawn of COVID when we knew people would want a storyline to look forward to and follow along with.
We’re sure you’ll enjoy the Season 1 storyline!
Here’s where we start to really differentiate from escape rooms. In most rooms, there’s a door that is locked and requires some genius - that’s you! - to open.
Of course there are many other things that must be done first, including (usually) many other things that need opening.
As escape room builders, we love this. We’re used to creating hidden compartments and contraptions. Since we can’t mail those in an envelope, however, we’ve gone ahead and worked many of our favourites into the escape room narrative.
For example, in one episode you’re helping JJ open an early-20th-century safe which weighs about 300 lbs in real life, as well as a Da Vinci-style cryptex.
In another episode, you help characters open a briefcase and a secret door leading to an underground lair.
We communicate much of these escape room realities to you through the online portals that we’ve built which accompany most episodes. The play-by-play videos with JJ (and Svetlana!) not only help flesh out the storyline, but they also keep the escape room aspects alive.
In some ways, Escape Mail actually opens the doors to more possibilities than the confines of an escape room!
In Episode 11 for example, we take you outdoors! No walls. No ceiling. No… doors! Just a VERY fun story with contraptions and contrivances along the way.
Simply put… there isn’t one in Escape Mail.
Why?
Well, I suppose we could have suggested a time limit, but we just didn’t think you’d be all that excited about it… plus, some of our puzzles are HARD and we mean HARD.
It’s not uncommon for players to set the game down, take a break, and come back to it later. Solving some episodes later in the season can take 2-3 hours!
So you might say this is the area where we are least like an escape room, which would be fair to say!
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT!
Now you know how Escape Mail compares to an actual escape room. We still love escape rooms, and we always will, but for the right time and place, Escape Mail can be even better.
But don’t take our word for it! Check out some reviews here.
How long have people been playing puzzles? Who invented the first puzzle? How have puzzles changed over time?
We’re so glad you asked! Let’s explore the answers to some of these questions together, shall we?
Good question. Well, this really depends on your definition. In one sense, EVERYTHING could be a puzzle.
Well everything must be interpreted in order to be understood, and through the process of interpretation, you infer meaning. For example, when you see a stop sign, you see a red octagon. That’s a clue. Red doesn’t always mean “stop” and “octagon” doesn’t always mean stop, but when you add the two together, you surely can understand that you must stop.
A red octagon is not a truly a stop sign without the word “STOP” written on it. In our opinion, this would NOT qualify as a puzzle. Why? Because the creator did not intend for there to be mystery, curiosity, exploration and discovery. The creator intended clarity.
That’s the kicker.
So, for the sake of clarity (haha), let’s define a puzzle as any sort of construction or communication intentionally designed to mystify the player until a verifiably correct solution is found.
Now that we’re armed with our working definition, let’s get into a short overview of the history of puzzles, codes, locks and all things intentionally mystifying!
A rebus puzzle is an image that depicts a concept or word, especially difficult words or concepts. Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Chinese pictographs could be considered puzzles, as the images represented real-world concepts. It is hard to know with certainty whether or not these early images were intended to bewilder and mystify the beholder, but they certainly do now! So we’ll include them in our list :) And yes, we use a lot of image-based puzzles at Escape Mail. There’s something universal about an image as opposed to a word that is limited by language. Also, images offer an opportunity for beauty as well in a different way than words do.
Can you picture a child walking through a field, making a path in the tall grass or wheat, going back and exploring offshoots, and eventually getting lost in their own meandering trail? We love mazes at Escape Mail. We’ve been drawing them since we were little kids! In Ancient Greece and Egypt, labyrinth puzzles were very popular. You probably know about one of them already: the Labyrinth of the Minotaur (half man, half bull). Apparently, the labyrinth did exist in real life (on the island of Crete?). If you play Escape Mail Season 1, you’ll find maze-like puzzles in a few of the episodes. The maze in Episode 9 we especially love!
While Oedipus Rex may not be the first person to stumble upon a dastardly riddle (the Sumerians were probably first), he is certainly one of the most famous. In the play by the Greek playwright Sophocles, the main character answers the sphinx’ question:
What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?
Can you n a m the answer?
As in the case of every good riddle, the question is intentionally, if not also artistically, veiled. Escape Mail co-founder Eric is an author of a book of riddles called Ratsel: Original Riddles. Eric’s eyes were opened to the potential of the entire world as a puzzle, filled with delight and wonder, as he wrote this book. One of the difficulties with riddles, however, is that there can often be multiple valid answers, which isn’t ideal for escape room design. Nevertheless, riddles remain near and dear to our hearts here at Escape Mail.
Around this same time as the riddle, the anagram was likely developed by a Greek poet Lycophron who apparently used them to flatter the rich and mighty. An anagram is a word or phrase that can be rearranged to reveal a new word or phrase. The original phrase can be unintelligible, but it is far more intriguing (and ingenious) when the word/phrase is intelligible both before and after the rearrangement. There’s an opportunity for sublime double-layered meaning here which we find really rich. We use lots of anagrams in Escape Mail, but we try to change up how we deliver them to you so that you keep getting incredible variety in every episode. We like the function of an anagram because it can be simple (attainable all on its own) or complex (requiring a key or instruction for you - the player - to know how to decode/unscramble).
BONUS: One anagram that you do not NEED to solve - but has been placed there for you as an easter egg - is found in Episode 6 Quiet as the Grave. Hint: the author’s first and last name anagrams into one word: a clue as to where the information in the article belongs!
We LOVE secret compartments… who doesn’t?
Rome was known for creating rings and lockets that contained secret compartments activated by levers and clasps. While the following video isn’t ancient, it sure is cool!
And that video should give you an idea of the kind of the kinds of things the romans were up to. Later, Northern Europeans were known for creating padlocks and furniture with secret compartments. So let’s talk about them next!
The Tangram is another puzzle from China that dates back to the Tang Dynasty. Tangrams are shapes of different sizes that - when arranged precisely - fit perfectly into a square. Puzzlers are then challenged to reconstruct silhouetted shapes using the pieces of the tangram. These puzzles became popular in North America during World War 1, with some even claiming they are the most popular dissection puzzle in the world! While we don’t have an official tangram in our games, the concept of spatial reasoning and logic is definitely a skill you’re going to need to play the game!
While technically not a puzzle (remember our definition?) we still find locks fascinating and pull inspiration from them regularly. The Vikings seem to get credit for the first padlocks, but that’s also up for debate. We include padlocks in this list because, after all, you need a key to open a lock, and in our Escape Mail games, the “key” is hidden in the information right in front of you. All you need to do is discover it!
At Mobile Escape we have built our own combination locks. You can find them hand-crafted in Secret of Sparta and Pirate’s Plunder, both tabletop games. The combination lock is credited to Al-Jazari, and you can watch a video of his 4-bolt multi-lock in action here.
While we haven’t included any locks in the envelopes of Season 1, JJ sure does face a bunch of them!
Okay, we really should write a separate blog about cyphers! But for now, let’s try and cover some key points: the person who gets credit for the cypher disk (although the concept of translating and obscuring data for nefarious purposes might find its origins with Julius Caesar) goes to the Italian Leon Battista Alberti.
We use the concept of a cypher (and in some cases, the same circular layout) in many episodes of Escape Mail.
Why is that? For a number of reasons, really. Cyphers work well as “overlays” (one piece on top of another) and since we’ve learned that people love the overlay function, just simply building the cypher can be fun (episodes 1, 2, and others). But the act of transcribing data from one state (confusion) to another (coherence) is virtually the name of the game. And so the cypher does this really, really well.
Cyphers have evolved quite a bit over the past 2000+ years. The transcription of data can be like a monoalphabetic Caesar Cypher (where one letter is always equivalent to another, and in the case of the Caesar Cypher, the letters are moved “up” or “down” the alphabet a certain amount) or polyalphabetic (where the transcription changes partway, or multiple times, through the code, making it much more difficult to decode). A famous movie you may have seen (and one we really enjoyed) is Imitation Game where Benedict Cumberbatch’s character attempts to decode Nazi messages during World War 2:
As the movie depicts, cyphers have weaknesses. Just like any puzzle, really, they can be cheated. But unlike a puzzle box or padlock that must be destroyed in order to be cheated, a cypher only needs to be studied in order to be “cracked”. We learned this the hard way during the first round of Escape Mail episode 1 production. Thanks to you, we’ve grown and changed! One of our new favourite ways of obscuring codes is by running words together. When you don’t run the words together, you run the risk of the spaces (breaks in words) giving you away. Language is predictable, and so repeating words and letters can be guessed or inferred, which can eventually crack the entire code.
There are way more puzzles out there than we could ever mention (or could ever be read!) In the last 400 years, there’s been a huge increase in the number and variety of puzzles that have been developed. While the list would no doubt be enormous, we created a short list of several of our favourites:
Once again, we go back to Japan for the origins of our favourite puzzle: Escape Rooms! What makes escape rooms unique? In truth, Escape Rooms are a conglomerate of any and every challenge conceivable. What makes them unique is that they are (1) timed experiences that (2) involve players working in teams (3) under the guise of a storyline or narrative (4) trying to escape through a door or passage or locked physical barrier of some kind (5) that requires a code or key or solution of some kind in order to open. We love how there are guidelines to the genre, while at the same time, the genre remains multi-disciplinary. This allows us as creators to keep giving you variety in puzzle content, which is ultimately so satisfying. We can pull from every era of history, every geography and landscape, nothing is off limits.
We’re excited to be at the forefront of an ever-evolving and expanding realm of puzzle design.
Reach out to us with your ideas! We’d love to hear from you!
My name's Eric.
I'm a co-founder and the lead designer/architect behind the game(s) you've just discovered.
Here's a good chance. I've gone ahead and listed 10 things I'm thankful for. Consider it a way of introducing myself. And as always, I love hearing from you! Leave a review, a comment, or shoot me an email at eric@mobileescape.ca any time!
No matter what is going on in my life, I know I can always choose a posture of gratitude. I remind myself of this regularly. So, here's a standing list of 10 things I’m thankful for:
Not that long ago, the thought of creating Escape Mail wasn’t even on the table. Now, many months later, it fills a table! I love that we pivoted to this wonder awakening product and having finally reached the finish line, where there’s a real sense of gratitude and accomplishment.
Peter has joined us on this wild journey and are pretty much caught up to us at Episode 12. Bravo! It hasn’t been easy with language and timezone differences, not to mention production methods and a variety of differences have meant they need to think on their feet. They’ve made us better every step of the way. Thank you guys!
While we don’t do what we do for the awards, it is nice to be recognized. Which is why winning the 2021 Tales of Triumph as well as a few Bullseye awards means a lot.
A slightly misleading photo below… Paul and I DO pack envelopes, but it’s more rare these days. Huge props to Kristina and Maddie especially! In order for you - the Escape Mail player - to have a great time, you need to have all the items in your envelope! That’s why I’m super grateful for Kristina, Maddy, Brian, Lisa and others who have diligently ensured that our hand-packed envelopes are complete… so few issues thanks to them! There have been significant quality control upgrades which has made this possible, which brings me to…
This guy is remarkable. Vlad is phenomenally talented, has an impeccable attention to detail, and is a team player. Vlad has improved our quality, efficiency, and overall business performance in a wide variety of ways. You’ll now see his handiwork all over our website and social media as he begins to take on even more responsibilities.
If you’ve ever written in to Mobile Escape with a question or comment, you’ll have met the personable and professional Carolyn. She brings a healthy dose of humanity into our start-up with her warmth, candour and care. She’s organized and dependable and the perfect person to help an Escape Mailer in need!
We wouldn’t have gotten past Week 3 in this business if it wasn’t for Paul. And we wouldn’t have survived the pandemic either. Paul works tirelessly in the background of this business to ensure the not-so-fun things get done, so that everyone else can enjoy the OH-SO-FUN things. He’s a straight-shooting, clear-thinking, soldier who will do what it takes to help others succeed. Bravo Pauly.
You might not know this, but since the beginning of Escape Mail, Paul’s dad Roy (also my father-in-law) secretly packs Episode 1s… for free. Which, as you can imagine, helps our business immensely. I don’t like to think of us as a charity, and I don’t like depending on others, but Roy refuses to budge. It’s his way of loving his adult kids, and I’m incredibly grateful for the hundreds of hours of work he’s put in to help us.
Work is important, but before work begins - before this business ever began - and when the work day is over, I return to my family. To my amazing wife and two kids, who are the brightest light in my life. I do what I do for a lot of reasons, but they are a massive one, and I love them so much.
Without people like you, I couldn't do what I do. I love the idea of you waiting expectantly for your mail to arrive, opening it excitedly with family and friends, starting the soundtrack, holding each item, exploring for a starting place and then diving into the many layers of puzzles. That gives me such a thrill! And every time you leave a review, I read it with relish!
What are some things you’re thankful for?
Welcome to the first episode of a new series of articles we’re writing called “Behind the Scenes” (we’re going for clarity in the name, ok?). In these articles we’ll be letting you in to the creative process that results in the games you play. If that doesn’t interest you, the following 1500 or-so words will be very boring. But if you want to know what it’s like to design an experience that brings joy to people around the world, then read on!
For several months now, we’ve been working at a ridiculous pace - conceptualizing, designing, testing, producing and mailing 1 episode per month - and while that can be sustained for a season, the creative mind needs a chance to inhale, get its head above water (insert gasp sound effect), and take a look around.
Part of looking around is looking back, so our hope is that by looking back, we can reflect, and refine. We hope some of you comment on these articles (seriously, do it!), track with our process, and even weigh in on the creative direction of future games and puzzles. Because, after all, we’re doing this for you. And we implement suggestions on a regular basis.
Sometimes, we get amazing comments, like this one from David F:
“Great family entertainment. We have played quite a few escape rooms and this matched the fun and difficulty of them. We played the hard level and it required different brain types and solving skills which kept everyone engaged. We ordered the rest of the season straight away. Excellent value for money.”
But it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. In these articles we’re going to give you a sneak peek into the difficult side of the process too (by difficult I mean soul-crushing). Because sometimes we get a 2-star review like this one from Veronica writing about Episode 8:
“Not our favourite one, we felt this series is getting too electronic. We quite loved the first couple of puzzles and how we only needed the internet to get an answer here or there. We loved being able to complete these by candle-light and being interactive with the paper. Now we feel one person has to be glued to the computer screen. We did love the picture roll, very clever!”
As an experience designer, I (Eric) read that review and my mind immediately goes to the puzzler - that’s you! - and your experience.
What will it be like for you to receive the envelope? To open it up? How will you latch onto the storyline? Where will your eyes and hands go first? Then, what puzzles will you start to solve? Will you have an easy time or a difficult time? What skills will you need to employ? What supports or clues will you rely on? What sounds are you hearing? If you are playing with others (as many of you do!) what will they be working on? And finally, in the case of Veronica, how would a digital compliment work with the materials?
My job is to ask myself those questions and a myriad of others, often at the same time (I feel like I’m going crazy most days). But when we first started Escape Mail, with Episode 1 Family Secrets, the questions I was asking were slightly different.
It was the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions and our Mobile Escape Room business had ground to a halt. With my head in my hands, it was business partner Paul who stepped in and said, “I think we could do this escape room thing in the mail!” We’d spent the last 3+ years not only building professional escape rooms in a mobile unit, but we’d also been relentlessly prototyping simple paper-based puzzles with students in schools. That’s one of the biggest reasons we were able to pivot so quickly and have Episode 1 to market in a mere number of weeks.
This *might be*? the very first picture of the very first playable version of Escape Mail in my basement about to be cut up, packaged, and delivered to play testers.
And so, for that reason, Episode 1 has a bit of a magical spark to it. When a dozen+ staff spend a few years working at one type of expression of escape room games (simple paper based puzzles) the transition to bring that type of game to market is… dare I say… smooth. Ok, smoother. My point is, it had been slow cooking for years and it was ready to be born.
We picked a price-point that was both sustainable for us, but also very reasonable for you (we personally felt that many escape games were needlessly expensive). To this date, one of the most consistent things we hear is that we’re reasonably priced! Yay!
Escape rooms are motivating for a few reasons, but one of the secret ingredients to the success of the industry is one simple, often-overlooked reality: you get to escape. There’s a literal door that motivates you to solve puzzles and succeed. When you do succeed, you progress from one reality (the room you’re in) to another. As an experience designer, that euphoria is difficult to replicate in any other fashion, be it online, or with stationery.
So, we relied on the storyline to carry most of that load. We landed on your “cousin” JJ as the main character for a few reasons (besides the fact that Mike is dastardly good looking): “cousin” works for any age, gender, last name, geography, etc and also implies there is a bond there that’s difficult to shrug off. He’s family after all! The hope is that the bond would entice you with a challenge that is reminiscent of the often-spammy requests from “distant relatives”. And, hilariously, we’ve had several people receive episode 1 as a surprise gift from someone else and think it was spam - so they threw it out without solving it!
That just CRACKS US UP. Of course, we do aim to be a bit light-hearted as well and not take ourselves too seriously! It is a game after all :)
When we started Season 1, we had very little experience developing web apps, and so we relied moreso on the paper itself to contain codes and reveal the answers. It’s riskier to do it that way! Sometimes super-sleuthers will be able to bypass clues by noticing patterns and making inferences. But rather than rely on digital means of “gating” content, we tried to do the majority of it in the paper-based game design.
Episode 1 features simple paper crafting - cutting and folding - which we believe can be a very rewarding experience. We’d been practicing in the school context for years! In an ideal world we’d have some paper craft in every episode :)
We leaned heavily on the cypher as a mode of puzzle-solving. And we learned a couple things about cyphers:
We also LOVE overlay puzzles for two reasons:
And while much of the episode is physical in nature, we also incorporated some digital components as well.
A few months prior, Paul and I (who are brothers-in-law) were talking to “Uncle Mike” (Paul’s brother) and he was recounting how he had secretly set up an email account with an auto-responder to serve as a “surprise” invitation for his wife to go on a trip. We thought that was not only romantic but quite a creative “real world” way to receive a communication from someone!
The email is the only digital part of the puzzle solving experience in Episode 1.
We also thought you - the puzzler - would love to see JJ in the flesh, so we shot a video of him concluding the episode and leaving you with a cliffhanger! Most people love the cliffhanger, and for the low cost, have no problem going on with the season. Some feel unsatisfied with the lack of resolution, and that’s a risk we knew we were taking with the plot.
We’ve also got feedback that our video was underwhelming to some, so we reshot it - just one example of the countless ways we have improved this series for you. And in return, you voted and we won 2nd place in a global competition for Best Tabletop Escape Game of 2020!
Thank you!
If you have any comments about the design process, the puzzles, or anything at all that you’d like to see, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Every customer interaction that we have is one that we really value. Whether you’re David leaving a 5 star review or Veronica leaving a 2 star review, you make us better!
Thanks for reading!
So you wanna know...
IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PUZZLES MADE FOR ADULTS VS KIDS?
What are the differences that make a puzzle age-appropriate?
How do you make a puzzle work for both kids and adults?
Is it even possible to do so?
We wrote a blog article recently that talked about the definition of a puzzle. We said a puzzle is:
“any sort of construction or communication intentionally designed to mystify the player until a verifiably correct solution is found.”
The interesting thing about kids is that they are in a constant state of learning - thus often mystified!
Conversely, adults grow to learn about certainty and often become less acquainted with mystery.
For kids, wonder and exploration is a normal reality for them. They build upon their knowledge bit by bit and the expansion of their understanding of reality is truly remarkable.
Co-founders Paul and Eric are both dads to little kids and they can attest to this incredible reality. In fact, over the sink in Eric’s house hangs this calligraphic artwork:
As adults we start to think we know all the things! We lose wonder. But we can recover it. At the risk of stating the obvious, we were all children once!
We have all experienced this rapid progression of knowledge, and in the process, we came upon a reasonable degree of certainty about a great number of things in our lives.
But ironically, our notion of certainty does not always help us solve puzzles, or retain our childlike wonder for that matter. Yet we desperately need it! As this Forbes article states, youth “haven’t formed any judgments about why the world is the way it is. They don’t care about how things have always been done.”
This is why, as escape room designers, we repeatedly see youth and children do better at some aspects of the escape room than adults.
We’re not blaming adults. We have experienced a great deal more pain, confusion, disappointment etc than our younger selves could have conceptualized. But what if we healed? What if our younger selves could help us heal? What if we let go of that pain and returned to wholeness, what might our lives look like?
We have always existed to awaken wonder. And we’ve never sought to exclude young or old in our games, because we believe that wonder is the natural state for the young, and its a healing state for the old.
So how do we make a puzzle work well for both youth and adults?
First, remember that “puzzles develop memory skills, as well as an ability to plan, test ideas and solve problems.” So something that’s very important is to level the playing field. Don’t ask an adult to rely on a highly advanced memory skill or the memories they’ve collected through years of experience. That would give them an unfair advantage. Also, play on the adult’s pre-conceived notions of how things should be. By challenging the norm, you’re offering the youth who does not have years of “norm” experience the opportunity to solve things with fresh perspective. And lastly, make the skill of “planning” very basic.
A great example of this in our escape rooms is the 6-piece puzzle in tomb of the pharaoh.
This is 1 of 6 (or 8) tiles, depending on which level of difficulty you play in Tomb of the Pharaoh.
All it asks you to do as the user is combine 6-8 squares, all with flat edges, into a coherent image. Often, we find that adults assume a specific arrangement and then stop when they think they have it. Youth more often than not will think freely and change their approach, trying again if something does not work.
It’s an “easy” puzzle in that the basic function is simple. What’s challenging is the “unthinking” and “rethinking” that children are often great at.
We hear that in customer testimonials from Escape Mail players, such as Kerry Ann, who commented on the advantage of having younger perspectives while trying to solve episode 1:
Now, all that being the case, there are some key differentiators that make puzzles more or less age appropriate.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN KID AND ADULT PUZZLES
The first key difference is the use of language. If a puzzle relies on reading comprehension, then that is a skill that is either present or not in younger persons. The ability to easily scan a document, retain what is read, and understand the mechanics of language, words, syntax and even poetic devices like metaphor are crucial in many Escape Mail puzzles.
That’s why we recommend our games for age 10+, and even then, adult accompaniment is extremely helpful.
Another differentiator is the use of supports (or clues/hints). Many adults do not like to use hints or clues. They view them as a crutch, or a lack of independence. If an adult uses a clue, there’s often a sense of let-down or disappointment. For younger players (and this is more true the younger you go) we often see immense joy and satisfaction from receiving a clue. In the escape room context, offering a clue to a younger person often elicits a wide-eyed, exuberant, “THANK YOU”.
Why is that?
We think it’s because youth have not yet been trained to think that getting help is a sign of weakness. They don’t have the awareness of social dynamics and competition and doing “better” than others. Sometimes competitiveness can drive adults to succeed, but often it can inhibit a spirit of collaboration, openness and curiosity.
So how do you (assuming “you” is an adult!) recover and maintain a childlike sense of wonder.
Surprisingly, the answer is not as simple as “play more Escape Mail.”
Simply purchasing a product does not inherently change your outlook on life. No one can do that for you. Only you can decide how to be.
All you have to do it use it.
PS. At the start of this article we quoted Catherine L’Ecuyer who has written an incredible article called “The Wonder Approach to learning”. There are so many good parts, but let’s just look at one. In the article, they make this phenomenal statement, “Beauty is what triggers wonder. Wonder attunes to beauty through sensitivity.” We endeavour to make our puzzles beautiful: to ensure the design is congruent, the images are appealing, the text is laid out well, etc. And in the process, by creating and communicating beautifully, we hope to trigger that wonder response in you, the puzzler. We’ll continue to get better and better at this as we develop more and more games, and we appreciate you following along on the journey.