Escape Calendar

• It gives more value because it’s spread over a much longer period of time.
• It gives a nice ritual for classrooms or kids who need structure. Play one puzzle a day. Or play the next puzzle every Friday afternoon. Or designate them “puzzle of the week” and let your students try to figure out the solution before the week is over.
• Because of this, the individual puzzles are often smaller but harder. They are small to keep the Escape Calendar from being too big, and to make it easy to get back into them. But they are a bit more creative and tough because you get more time to solve them!
• It helps count down to important moments. These can be fixed moments, like holidays, but you can also use them to count down to birthdays or other special events.

• As explained above, the type of experience is just very different from a regular escape kit. You won’t really be “immersed” or highly focused on the puzzles, because you solve a small one each day and then go do something else again.
• Such a Calendar often contains 2 or 3 weeks. That is a lot of puzzles. It can be overwhelming to some people, especially if you start to “fall behind”.
• For that same reason, though, we keep the puzzles small. You won’t find more grandiose or big Eureka! puzzles here. They’re just little challenges to solve each day or each week.

You always get a PDF file. When extracted, it usually contains

• Calendar: some shared board or map where you track your progress and unlock new days/puzzles.
• Introduction Sheet: this explains the puzzle setup, the start of the story, and anything else to know beforehand.
• Answer Sheet: tips, hints and answers to the puzzles in case you’re stuck. This is usually obfuscated to prevent accidentally reading them.
• Puzzle Material: these can be standalone puzzles, or general material of which you have to figure out where to use it.
• Bonus Material: sometimes, there are fun bonuses like a “reward” for escaping, or just some fun thematic elements to place around the table.

For very large calendars this will be a ZIP file with multiple PDFs (say, one for each week of puzzles).

As explained above, this idea started after playing an Advent escape calendar. We accidentally bought a German one (we’re Dutch) and still had a great time solving the German puzzles every day until Christmas. The next year we bought a new one, and the next year we bought a new one, and now it’s a ritual to play the Advent escape calendar every day of December after dinner.

I thought there was a lot of potential here to count down to other holidays. Or to simply put the escape experience into a “calendar container” and see what new and creative possibilities arise.