About this Halloween escape room
A letter arrives: you have inherited Rosehallow Estate as the only living relative of the late Edward Blackwood. Your father’s friend Gary warns you that Blackwood was obsessed with the occult and alchemy, vanished during one of his experiments and left a villa said to be full of locks and traps. You call a few friends and go anyway.
Mary, the illustrator behind My Party Games, made this DIY escape room for teenagers and adults. She calls it relatively hard, with some tricky puzzles and some easy ones, and says the whole family can play together. Each puzzle sits in its own printed envelope marked with a code, so players can only open the next envelope once they have cracked the previous one. It works in a single room or spread through the house.
How to play in one minute
- Print the puzzle sheets and envelopes (colour, ideally on matte card stock), assemble the envelopes with a glue stick and put each puzzle in its envelope.
- Hide the envelopes around the room or the house. Hand over the backstory and the first puzzle.
- Give each team three hint tickets; they can trade a ticket for a hint, or earn extra tickets with small dares.
- Players open envelopes in sequence: only the code from the previous puzzle unlocks the next.
- Solve all nine within the one-hour limit to escape. With more than five players, split into teams and print a set per team.
What’s in the files
- One download per puzzle on the post (no single combined game PDF), plus the backstory and tip tickets, a page of nine tips and the solution sheets.
- Puzzle 4 is papercraft: a tetrahedron to fold and glue and a skull mask to cut out. Puzzle 6 uses a cipher wheel to hide separately.
- Colour sheets (the backstory is an A4 landscape page); card stock for the 3D pieces, plain paper for the envelopes.
- The game master keeps the tips and solutions. The site’s terms ask you to share the page link, never the files.
In the PDF
- backstory card
- hint tip tickets
- 9 puzzles with printable envelopes
- cipher wheel
- 9 tips
- solution sheets
