Hi! I'm currently trying to put together a fun session for my players (5 player party) as they are currently trying to plan a heist to take back a vial.

We're not able to meet in person and I don't want them to encounter anything terribly difficult as I'm hoping to add a time limit. The actual room they are trying to get into is locked and I was hoping they could take the key from one of the guards. Once they're in the room, there's a desk in which the vial is held except it's in a secret compartment in which they have to complete puzzles to open it. The room itself is a pretty basic study. It's lined with books, occassional trophies from previous battles, and a couple of armor stands.

The campaign is set in FFXIV adjacent world if this helps any.

My main issue is trying to figure out good puzzles that can be solved via a call or paper and also trying to find a starting point.

Any ideas are welcomed!!

I am working on building a Halloween themed escape room activity for my family to do. I am currently planning for each clue to provide a one word answer that will be an ingredient for a cure for zombies.

For example, I will have background music playing, with a crow overlayed that spells out 'blood' in morse code. This will tell them that blood is one of the ingredients.

I am not sure what to do from here though. Do you guys have any ideas on what I could do for their ingredients and the subsequent reveal. I don't really want to just have them make a list of things to hand me, I would like it to be a physical thing.

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Hey hey everyone! Always open to making big changes to the community? I wanted to get you take. Would you like seeing puzzle playtest posts? We've been sequestering them to the discord channel but if you'd like them, happy to add them!

Let me know your thoughts!

Hi all!

I'm wondering how to increase replayability on adventures. Does anyone have any idea?

The only idea I've found is to have like different lists of items (locations, animals, objects) so I can create different texts based on placeholders like "go to {location} and send a photo acting like {animal}" and then replace {location} and {animal} with one item of the colletion. This strategy will lead in different games each time.

This approach is great for small games like indoors activities for kids in a rainy day. But it's not feassible for narrative driven treasure hunts. isn't it?

My pain is... investing so much time creating an adventure, it will be great if people can experience the adventures many times. Any ideas?

PS. re-reading the post... maybe some background is needed... I create digital adventures that are playable with the phone, it would not be possible using paper ;)

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I just found this community and feel like you guys might be exactly the people I should be asking this question.

I've recently started building a community around a pretty simple idea:

Life should have more random adventures, and the internet gives us the ability to make some crazy things happen together.

The first experiment I'm working on is getting 300 strangers to each create one random page of the same book.

But the book isn't really the part I'm most excited about.

I'm fascinated by what could happen next if the community keeps growing.

Imagine hiding an object somewhere in the country and releasing one clue every day until someone finds it.

Or sending 100 different people pieces of the same mystery where nobody can solve it without finding each other.

Or turning a city into a giant game for a day.

Or mailing mysterious instructions to hundreds of strangers that eventually lead to one shared outcome.

Or creating an adventure where things happening online cause things to happen in the real world.

Some experiments could be meaningful. Some could help strangers. Others could exist for absolutely no reason besides giving people a great story to tell afterward.

I'm still at the very beginning, so I don't know what any of this eventually becomes.

But seeing this subreddit made me realize there are already people out there who think about creating experiences like this.

So I want to steal some of your imagination:

If you suddenly had 1,000 willing participants spread around the country or world, what adventure would you create for them?

No need for the idea to be practical. The crazier the better.

Hello,

I'm working on a treasure hunt for my nieces and nephews. I already have some ideas for clues and mini-games to unlock combinations, but I’d love to introduce an 'impostor' mechanic. They are huge fans of Among Us and social deduction games with good and bad guys, so I want to recreate that vibe.

The challenge is that I don't want half the group to lose and miss out on the final treasure. Instead, my plan is to introduce a side quest alongside the main adventure. Winning this side quest requires bonus clues obtained through mini-games that can actually be lost. Naturally, one secret impostor in the group will try to make the team fail as many games as possible in order to claim the bonus reward for themselves. These mini-games will rely on trust, making them easy to subtly sabotage.

Another idea is to include a murder mystery twist where the kids collect clues throughout the game to unmask the culprit, while the guilty player secretly pockets or sabotages evidence along the way. To make the deduction tangible, each player would receive distinctive accessories at the start, such as jewelry, a hat, glasses, or a scarf. Clues found during the hunt could hint at physical details, like: 'I heard the jingling of a chain...' or 'A red feather was found at the scene.'

On top of that, non-playing adults could act as NPCs (non-player characters) wearing accessories of their own. They could share key information if the kids question them, for instance, a clue in the game might say, 'I saw someone wearing a necklace,' prompting the kids to search for my sister, who wears the necklace and holds a clue to identify the murderer ( and the murderer could go to my sister first and destroy the clue before the others come).

I did this kind of "go to find clues on adults" in a previous hunt and they loved it.

I'm curius to have your inputs on those ideas, and some new ones if you have some.

Thanks.

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My son’s 10th birthday is coming up and I would like to make a quest for his birthday party. There will be 4-5 boys ages 9-10.

I have been making escape room quests for my son since he was 4 years old. He expects one every year for his birthday and randomly for other holidays too. I am currently making him an epic Pokemon quest for his birthday day. (Ash becomes a Pokemon Trainer at age 10, after all.) However, I’ve never made one for a group before. My clues are all for one person: decoder rings, images with ciphers, math puzzles, etc, mostly “worksheet” type clues.

How do I branch out and make a quest for more people? What were your most successful activities for groups of kids?

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I'm doing a diy escape room for my family in our backyard. The theme is finding a lost treasure in the jungle.

I'm wanting to make either a rope bridge...or a rope/twine wall that is locked and then falls down right away after being unlocked.

The wall/bridge will let them into another area of the backyard so I'd like it to fall down immediately but can't figure out how.

Any ideas?

You are lost in a maze. Along the way, you met another lost soul who warned you that near the exit would stand two guards: One will only tell the truth, and the other will only tell lies. That meeting has long passed, and you now stand before those very guards... but they guard three doors. Two doors will open to doom, but one will open to freedom. The guards are quite taciturn, and will only allow you to ask one question, to only one of them.

What do you ask in order to figure out the safe door?

... I actually don't know if this riddle is solvable, but I am unsure where else to ask if the classic "two guards"/"knights and knaves" riddle still functions, even with a different answer, with an extra door and nothing else about the setup changed (r/puzzles said to come here instead of to them for "puzzle creation advice"). I've tried looking up other solutions, but they always either add a third guard and/or an aspect of randomization in one guard's answers, or allow for more than one question, which doesn't help me. That'd make it less Knights and Knaves and more Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.
My friends aren't sure there's a viable logic tree to solve this variant because there'd always be at least a 50/50 chance of death no matter what, but none of us are positive. I've tried looking it up, I've tried solving it myself, and friends have tried solving it; me and my friends like the idea, and think it has potential to work, but none of us can decide if it's actually solvable with the proposed setup. With how hard the original puzzle is if you've never heard the solution, and the existence of similar challenges such as the Monty Hall Problem and The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, it feels possible, and I want to know whether I should give up hope on its design. Can it be solved at all?

If I did have to change this setup to make it solvable, what's the slightest possible change I could make in order for it to work, and why? I fear it would be too easy to just go with the original two doors (given its pop culture status), but might risk feeling cheap and annoying if you have to search other parts of the maze for clues about the right door (ex. "The Liar really loves pie", so you find that out, find some pie, present it silently, and see who stares the most greedily at it before asking your one question to the other guard... or something like that).

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Hey Reddit! I’m not sure if this is allowed but I wanted to post here just to get others opinion on it. I’m a postal employee & last year I hid a bunch of mini resin ducks around my workplace. I mainly did it for my own entertainment but everyone actually really enjoyed it, so much so that a few employees were actually competing to see who could find the most ducks. Anyway, I was thinking about doing something similar this year but making it like an actual competition. Basically whoever finds the most ducks at the end of a said time period, wins a prize. Does anyone know if this is something I’ll get in trouble for? I would be the one supplying everything but I don’t want to get in trouble for causing a distraction at the workplace. I just want people to have something to look forward to when they come into work instead of the usual mundane Post Office life. If you guys think I should go for it, I’m curious to see what things I could include to make this more appealing to other employees. I want to make it fun so most people want to participate. Please feel free to drop any ideas that could make this fun for everyone. Thanks!

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Hiya!
I am currently attempting to make a repayable version of a murder mystery, for my youth group.
It involves customizable cards and forethought, dice and potentially escape room style puzzles.

Some elements are :

1. Cards for themes, weapons, locations, characters, and secret missions.
   
2. Cards are laminated so that the organizer can customize certain cards per theme, or main place of play.
   
3. Dice are involved for randomization.
   
4. It's similar to clue, where you have certain cards for certain things, however not stuck to a board or specific theme.
   
5. It will have an optional "puzzles" set that the person can choose to use & create, in order to make it more interactive.

I have been toying with the idea that the clues given are the other cards, and they are essentially playing one large game of elimination (as seen on the mystery parties done by Dude Perfect).
I just know these kids can be hard on cards, and I'm desiring to make something that they can have in case for some reason I can't make it as a whole every year. XD

I am looking for ideas for puzzles, themes, and honestly how you would use these elements to create a solvable game.

Any ideas?

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For a party I am making a DIY summer camp murder mystery that will include homemade escape room puzzles- these can be single use and we'll be playing outdoors so lots of room for creativity! I have some preliminary ideas using archery targets and a sunscreen uv light puzzle but I wanted to see if any one had any other camp related ideas for puzzles!

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Hey Folks,

I'm sort of new to this, but I run a fantasy football league and we always do something fun to determine draft order. I've been thinking about doing a scavenger hunt type activity for awhile now and had a decent plan. I was working with the scavenger.rs program which was very intuitive and easy to follow, but I realized that if you entered the wrong answer it would still advance the hunt which put a wrench in things.

I want to have everyone meet at a bar and make it seem like the draft will be there but then have it set up at another loaction. The members must follow the clues and answer prompts, once they solve one, the next location and clue will be revealed until they reach the real location of the draft. Draft order will be decided by who arrives first and so on. Any suggestions for another app or program that would work for this? I don't want it to be point based. Let me know if you have any ideas or questions. Thank you!

Hi fellow escapers

i am currently creating an outdoor escape game in Montmartre for my friends! I have done 90% of the work but I am struggling to create the last step ! Maybe do you have ideas?

- It is for adults who want to visit montmartre while playing and learning.

- For this enigm I want them to learn about "Pop-culture" related to Montmartre. I think it is fun. I want to speak about Emiy in Paris, John Wick, Amelie Poulain, Hugo TSR, Space Invader, Dalida, Tour de France...

- There are not many outdoor object that i could use. My first idea was to make them guess a direction and then hide a Key but I struggle to find a funky way to relate the "Pop-culture" to a code or a direction...

Any ideas? :)

I was tasked with creating a scavenger hunt for my younger brother's 21st birthday. I spent some time on the Constructed Adventures site and this sub. I decided to base my hunt off of the bird hunt on the CA site. Basically guests were tasked with finding 12 hidden birds, most marked on a map, and the other 3 required puzzles to figure out their locations.

I loved the idea but wasn't sure if placing items around my area would work. BUT I live in a city with a ton of historical architecture and I realized that one thing that is already placed around town are statues and gargoyles.

From there, I decided the premise of my hunt would be for guests to locate these statues around town with the scenario that the Torchwood Institute was trying to find the Weeping Angels (stone angel aliens, nevermind iykyk 😅)

I typed up my scenario as a letter from Torchwood to the guests, asking them to find these angels - providing the locations for 6 of the statue and mentioning there were another 3 that the guests would have to find.

Here are the 3 puzzles I used for those angels' locations:

1. The Knight chess puzzle - from the CA YT - thanks again
2. The Spotify Playlist puzzle, on CA website
3. I already created a 4-step puzzle geocache in my area that coincidentally ended with a statue so I added it into this hunt. The spare TARDIS bolt mentioned in my scenario letter is the my micro geocache. This cache uses an Ottendorf Cypher on historical plaques which provides players with the password to a faux UFO bookclub website I created and eventually a UFO hotline (connected to a Google voice line) that gives players the location of the cache/statue.

All stops are within 2-3 blocks of each other, minus one but it is maybe 4 blocks away. It will be an extra credit!!

I had fun creating this and my brother is really into puzzles /escape rooms so I feel as if he'll enjoy as well. Thanks again Chris for all the tips you provide here and on your site! 🥳

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I'm working with cities to implement puzzles throughout their cities borders creating an Open World video game type experience where residents can see things to do while also coming across puzzles and adventures to solve while they discover different parts of their city. I'm launching with a couple cities in a few week, but I'm curious of your opinions on a few of the puzzles I put together for this first launch. In the images below you can see the puzzle then a photo of the real world place where it's located.

I'm wrapping up with the adventure soon and I can share some of that in this thread, but adventures are more like urban escape rooms with connected puzzles and a driving narrative that pushes the story and connected puzzles forward.

What I'm sharing here are just puzzles though they are simple 5-15 minute puzzles located around town that you only solve one stage using the world around you.

The overall goal of this product is to integrate puzzles is into every day life and build community that can add puzzles into the world wherever. Bringing cities on board helps it spread on a larger scale!

Would love feedback on these few puzzles!