Runaways

Below are the common Charms (types of products) you’ll find in this Faction. Visit their pages for details about what they are and what is inside once purchased.

• Printable Escape Kit
• Digital Escape Kit
• Escape Calendar

An escape kit (or “escape room”) is a collaborative puzzle experience for any group of people.

It differs from just “a bunch of puzzles” by having a story, unique material, interconnected puzzles, and out-of-the-box thinking (sometimes literally). It’s a longer immersive experience that asks you to experiment and explore more, finding connections between puzzles.

The name comes from physical locations in which you literally get locked in a room and need to find the key. That’s where the hype started.

A printable escape kit is far cheaper, faster and more accessible than a paid location. Or almost any other recreational activity. Buy it once, play it whenever, with whomever, however many times. You decide if you want to put a timer on it (to see if you escape “in time”) or not.

Nothing beats sharing an experience with others. Nothing beats our human desire to solve problems, that Eureka! moment when you suddenly see what’s been staring you in the face all the time. Young or old, male or female, everyone can enjoy puzzling and playing their part in a fun mystery.

And of course, our digital escape kits make this process even faster and smoother. We designed our own unique framework for those, which is publicly available for anyone to use for their own escape experiences too.

The precise properties and requirements of each escape room are listed at its product page. In general, though, we aim for the following types of experiences.

• Minimal setup: as few pages as possible, no other requirements (such as glue or a phone), printable in both grayscale and color.
• Everyone can play: the one who prints/prepares the game does not see the answers and can play along. There are always multiple puzzles to do simultaneously.
• A full experience: escape rooms take 1 to 2 hours. There’s a clear theme, art design, story, and more than enough puzzling.
• Family-friendly: as little text as possible (to make them language-independent), friendly themes (instead of solving bloody murders all the time), colorful and vibrant on the table.

In practice, you only need to prepare the material and read/explain the introduction page. After a few minutes, even young kids understand what to do and are off to a hot start.

Escape Kits are very tightly designed experiences. You can’t just leave out a puzzle and expect things to still work! That makes these probably the least customizable products on the entire store.

That said, there are still things you can do.

• You can modify printable kits however you like. They’re physical pieces anyway, so you can cut them, write over them, leave some pieces out. If you know your way around a PDF editor, you can even modify the material directly.
• We designed the digital kits to be just as transparent. If you buy one, the text files with the puzzles are available to you too. You can read and edit them directly, then use those when loading the experience.

However you like! Share them with an entire class. Prepare one as a surprise gift. Customize it for your kid’s birthday party.

You don’t need a special license or permission for anything. You bought the experience—it’s yours to experience it as you wish.

I am a game designer with 100+ board games and video games on Pandaqi. I’m very proud of that work and think there’s a lot of fun to be had there for anyone.

One day, however, I realized more people were willing to play escape rooms than board/video games. Nothing to learn beforehand. Less daunting. Go as fast or slow as you want. Work together.

At the very least, it’s more practical: they support any group size, need no rules explanation, and people can join or leave as they wish.

It was often a struggle to succesfully play games when the family got together on holidays. That’s why I started designing these escape kits instead. They were such a success that I made them a core Faction of this website, and switched to favoring these over board games at family gatherings.