About the Deckscape demo
You are trapped in a small room with a locked door. There is a metal toolbox, an electric panel and a little remote control, and you don’t know the code. That is the whole set-up of the free Deckscape demo, a ten-card taste of the escape-room series designed by Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino, illustrated by Alberto Bontempi and published by dV Giochi.
Deckscape packs a full escape room into one deck of about 60 cards: no app, no board, and every solution printed on the back of its puzzle card. The demo works the same way at a much smaller scale. You split the cards into three decks by colour, solve the puzzle on top of each deck together, and flip the card to check your answer. Every wrong answer costs you a cross on the score card, and the clock decides your final rating.
How to play in one minute
- Print the six pages on both sides, so that each card front (1 to 10) lines up with its back (R1 to R10), then cut the cards without reading them.
- Get paper, a pencil and a clock. Read card 1, flip it and note the time.
- Sort the next nine cards into three decks by colour. Always follow the card on top of each deck.
- To solve a puzzle, read it, agree on one answer, then flip the card. Wrong answer: mark a cross.
- Open the door on the last card, add two minutes per cross to your time and read your result.
What you need to print
The PDF is six A4 pages laid out for double-sided printing, so the fronts and backs of the cards match. If your printer can’t print on both sides, print every page, cut out the cards and glue each front to its back. Colour matters here: one of the puzzles is a coloured keypad. The download is direct from dV Giochi’s website (about 4.5 MB).
Who it’s for
The demo says ages 12 and up and 1 to 6 players, and it really does take around ten minutes, which makes it a good first escape room for a family table or a way to find out whether Deckscape’s style suits you before buying a full deck. The puzzles are logic and observation: maths symbols, a maze, a grid of letters, a pattern of triangles. Nothing needs outside knowledge.
Tip: let one person play “game master” the first time: they shuffle nothing, keep the decks in order and read the solutions aloud, so nobody sees the next card by accident.
In the PDF
- 10 double-sided cards (fronts 1–10, backs R1–R10)
- rules on the first page
