Wizard Challenge Game
This year’s Halloween escape room party was inspired by the Triwizard Tournament. As our guest list has grown over the years, we have found that splitting up the gameplay into shorter challenges is more fun for everyone – the groups don’t have to wait as long to get into the game, and it breeds a healthy competition to see which team achieves an overall ‘best time.’ The team that wins ‘best time’ in round 1, may not do as well in round 2, and by round 3 the competition is palpable!
Dragonade Challenge
Dragonade is the new witchy brew that is sweeping the nation! Dragonade is the key to unlock this challenge!
Mermaid Challenge
There is an underwater treasure locked away. The teams must follow the mermaid’s clues and solve her puzzle, before it is too late!
Maze Challenge
This deceptively difficult final challenge begins easily – find the 13 tiles that form the maze. However there is only ONE way the maze fits together to unlock the final lock’s 5 letter combination.
Challenge 1: The Dragonade Formula
The Dragonade Challenge began with the tag on the locked box that read, “The sum of it’s parts PRICES, in the correct quantities, is the key to unlock the Dragonade box.”
This was a multi- step puzzle to solve. There was a mat in the room with a 9 square grid. To solve this puzzle, the teams needed to find 9 coins in the room. Each coin had a different value from 1-9. When they solved the puzzle, it assigned a value to 3 runes.
The mat that solved the coin puzzle had a logo for ‘Abeque’s Apothecary Supplies’ on the top of the page. Upon searching the room, the team found a pricing card for Abeque’s Apothecary Supplies. There were three ingredients on the pricing sheet that did not have a cost, but showed a single rune in place of a price. These runes matched up with the coin puzzle. With these two pieces of information, they were able to assign a price to the correct ingredients. There was also an advertisement for Dragonade within the room that listed the ingredients in Dragonade… many players missed this hint!
The final part of this first challenge was to find the correct QUANTITIES of each ingredient in Dragonade. This was a tricky clue to find!
The players knew the ingredients in the formula. There was a potions area in our room that was full of bottles and jars of ingredients. The inside of one of the Dragonade ingredient bottle labels hid the solution (which you could see through the clear bottle), but it was illegible! However… if they put the other ingredients of Dragonade into the bottle… EUREKA! The text could now be read! Ooohs and aahs ensued.
With this final piece to the puzzle, each ingredient’s PRICE ($) x QUANTITY added together was the 3 digit lock combination to complete the first challenge.
Inside the box was a golden egg, which ties in with the Dragonade logo. Inside the egg was a piece of parchment that read, “AHAHAHAHAHA!!” This will come into play later!
Challenge 2: The Mermaid’s Puzzle
Lights Off!
After the first challenge was completed, we hung up the mermaid tapestry and turned the lights off. It was time for black lights!
Knowing that we would bathe the room in black light for an underwater challenge, we intentionally used silver accents in the wizard shop decorations this year. The blacklight and silver combination gave the room an underwater feel for this challenge. The revealed text read, ” Find the five hidden clues to crack the 3 digit code & solve the underwater challenge.”
The Mermaid Challenge began with the parchment that was awarded in the first challenge. The slip of paper that read, “AHAHAHAHAHAH!!” had text between the lines in black light ink. It could not be read until ‘underwater.’ This was a nod to HP- when the egg was opened underwater, it could be understood. The revealed text read, “Find the five hidden clues to crack the 3 digit code and solve the underwater challenge.”
With the initial parchment and an empty jigsaw puzzle tray, the challenge began!
The teams needed to find 24 missing jigsaw puzzle pieces to assemble the mermaid’s puzzle, and 5 clues to begin the solve.
The jigsaw puzzle pieces were hidden throughout the room, in relatively easy-to-find locations. As the room was relatively dark, we did not want to make it too difficult to search.
The players were also given a flashlight for their search. This helped them find both the jigsaw pieces and the black light reflective clues. Since the room was fully lit in black light, the flashlight made the black light reflective clues disappear, which helped them find which important information was initially hidden, and now visible and important clues.
These clues were props that were in the game from the very beginning of the first challenge, so they had been innocently sitting in plain sight for the entire party.
For previous year’s parties, I had hand-drawn all of the black light reflective clues with a black light pen. This was both time constraining and limiting in capabilities. However, after some research and trial & error, I had figured out how to PRINT black light reflective content. This allowed us to have a lot more fun with the imagery and complexity of graphics that were reflective in black light!
Once all of the clues were found and the jigsaw puzzle was assembled, they could begin to solve for the combination lock.
This was a 2 part solve:
The jigsaw puzzle had 5 sets of runes that needed to be converted into numbers. The 5 clues allowed the players to solve for numbers. Each of the 5 clues also included information that set up a logic puzzle. With the now-translated 5 sets of numbers, the players were able to solve for a 3 digit combination to unlock the mermaid’s treasure box!
Inside the box was a hexagon tile that read, “Thirteen hexagon tiles are missing. Find the tiles to complete the maze.” This sets us up for the final challenge…
Challenge 3: The Maze
The final challenge was a maze.
To kick off this challenge, the players started with the hexagon tile they achieved in the locked box of round 2 that read, “Thirteen hexagon tiles are missing. Find the tiles to complete the maze.”
At this point, the time scores for each team was neck-and-neck. The race to find the 13 missing tiles was frantic! Once they found the 13 tiles, they brought them all together to a mat in the room.
The mat showed an incomplete maze. It was missing 13 hexagons. When the 13 missing tiles were placed on the mat in the correct positions, the maze’s path lead through only the five letters, in the correct order, that unlocked the final combination lock.
Maybe I missed it, but curious as to if a similar format to this would work for a birthday party… And if so, how many kiddos could participate? And what would be an ideal age range for participants?
This game is meant to be played at a gathering – whether for a holiday, birthday, or everyday party. This particular game has three parts – they can be played independently (choose only one part for a shorter, simpler game) or back-to-back challenges.
Any game like this (escape room style) is best played in groups of 8 or fewer people, as each player can be more involved in the game in a smaller group. Though you definitely CAN play with more, you will find that a few players may get antsy because they can’t see or hear what is going on when it is more than 8.
For larger parties, you can break your guests into smaller teams (4-8 per team) where the game is set up in one area, and ‘party’ with food and drinks is in another area. Each team can take turns completing the game and make it a competition for the team that beats the hunt with the best time. When we played this game, we had a party of around 24 guests. We had the players break into smaller teams, choose a ‘dragon’ from a bag, and their team’s order of playing was based on the order of dragons we had preselected.
The age range for this game is probably 12+, as components could be challenging for kids younger than this age group, and it is a longer gameplay which may be too long for a younger attention span (approximately 20 min. per challenge, for a total of approx. 1 hour of gameplay if all three parts are played).
The game we designed for under 12 is the “Wizard School Hunt” which is available in both a printed and digital format:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/749037004/wizard-school-hunt-party-game-digital
https://www.etsy.com/listing/706823643/wizard-school-party-game-kit
The gameplay, clues, and puzzles are a mix of ‘scavenger hunt’ straightforward clues, riddle-based clues, and elementary level math & logic puzzles. It is also a shorter game – our other (complex) games clock in around 35-60 minutes of gameplay, while this one is probably around 20-30 minutes, depending on how well you hide your ‘scavenger’ clues.
Your escape game ideas are marvelous! I’m Escape room fan and I also used to prepare some escape games for my children. Can you tell me how to print black light reflective content?
It is a complicated process, which requires a separate printer used for blacklight reactive printing only and sourcing blacklight reflective inks that are compatible with the printer. Then there is also a design process associated with it – how to set up your files to print in the correct blacklight ink colors, as well as printer settings to account for overlapping your *visible* content with the blacklight reactive content so that they align properly. It was quite the trial and error process, but with great results once the learning curve is achieved.