DIY birthday escape room game

As we are generally fans of puzzle games and escape rooms 🔒, I had the idea a few years ago to do a Christmas treasure hunt. It has become somewhat of a tradition, though it takes a lot of time to plan. Today for the birthday of Reni it was the biggest hunt yet, filled with self-crafted puzzles and a long string of hidden clues that lead to the location of the hidden presents. 🥳

There were simpler things too like solving a crossword puzzle made of board game related questions that leads to a bookshelf where a note is hidden, or you find the floor plan of the house and coordinates on another piece of paper that lead to small snippets of coded information that you have to solve to go to the next clue. 🕵️‍♀️

But also some more complex things like solving nonograms that - when combined together - give you a QR code that shows a piece of furniture in the house after scanning, which hides another clue. Or a 4-digit padlock locking a box that only has a cryptic riddle on it – the solution to which was the time on a clock that was actually stopped at a particular time 🕞. I also bought a cluebox, in which I hid a special cipher which was needed to break some of the secret messages.

Furthermore after finding the 2 parts of a UV lamp and using it, you could find one of the presents on the floor plan, and also, one of the cryptic notes that seemed to serve no purpose suddenly showed valuable information about letters written with a UV marker in one of the rooms, that give the location of another present. 🎁

Of course there were a lot more puzzles to this „heist” and an interesting way of how they all fit together, that cannot be conveyed in a short post. I decided to do everything in a non-linear way to increase the difficulty this time. I think I went a bit overboard, as it ended up taking several hours to solve and find everything 😅, but it was definitely awesome. 👍