Isn’t Easter really all about an escape room to begin with?
Shortly after Easter last year, our son announced that he no longer… ascribed to certain youthful beliefs regarding the secular aspects of the holiday. (Not that any kids are reading this, but you gotta not spoil stuff, you know?)
He’s also not a big fan of candy, but he LOVES the Easter egg hunt tradition. So basically, he likes looking for small, colorful things around the house, and then he’s pretty much done for the day.
This year my wife picked up some Warhammer 40K model kits for him — Smalls loves to build and paint little gray wargame miniatures — and asked me if I could use them as prizes for a scavenger hunt. The idea sounded fun to me, so I dove in. For the past week, I’ve been filling gaps in my schedule with crafting puzzles that will, step by step, lead him to his new paintable figures. And a few scratcher lottery tickets, but let’s be honest, barring a lesser Easter miracle, the Warhammer Tyranids are the big prizes.
Unbeknownst to Smalls, starting tomorrow, we’ll probably have a fairly regular new Easter tradition. He’s going to get a search throughout the house, but not for plastic eggs full of chocolate he’ll never eat. Nope, this time he’s getting the homemade equivalent of an escape room. He loves escape rooms, so I feel good about whether he’ll enjoy it. My only real concerns are that I’m going to have to keep topping it for years to come, and I’ll have to find ways to keep the set-up concealed from him in the days leading up to it.
The first part was figuring out where the boxes were all going to be hidden. These kits aren’t huge, but they come in boxes that aren’t going to fit in plastic eggs, not by a long stretch.
Luckily, we have plenty of places around the house that Smalls won’t stumble onto without guidance. He doesn’t eat a lot of breakfast cereal, so it’s safe to assume that he’s not going to be looking in any cereal boxes unprompted — especially not those he wouldn’t have chosen to buy in the first place.
There are also a LOT of board games in this house, and many of those have enough extra space in them to hold the smallest of the Warhammer boxes. The odds of him randomly deciding to dig into a specific one before he knows he’s looking for something are slim.
I can’t give him just those few stops on his search though. No, that would be way too easy. Nope, I’ve got a full ten stops in this adventure, inside the house, outside the house, in the garage, and even in the attic crawl space accessible through his own bedroom. Nine puzzles, some of which even have smaller puzzles within that need to be solved in order to get to the next checkpoint.
Let’s have some fun and take a look at a few of those, shall we?
THE STARTING PUZZLE
It’s a rebus! But this kid knows enough about escape room puzzles that I couldn’t just put the rebus in a logical, sequential order. No, I had to make him work for it. I’ve set the portions of the rebus into a four-by-four grid with coordinates along the top and left edges. I’ve listed the corresponding locations of each image at the bottom of the page. And to obfuscate things just a little more, I’ve thrown a few irrelevant images into the leftover spaces of the grid. Estimated challenge level: 5 out of 10.
I’m really eager to see his reaction to the solution here; this is the one that leads to the aforementioned space near his bedroom. There’s literally no way for me to get to that part of the house once he’s gone to bed tonight… so I actually hid the next clue there yesterday. When he finds it, it’ll have been tucked away just a few yards from his bed for two full days. How it got there without him noticing is gonna blow his mind.
PUZZLE #2
This is one of those multi-part puzzles I’d mentioned earlier. In order to make any sense of the gibberish symbols in the first image here, he’s going to need to find two things (that, lucky for him, are found together elsewhere in the house): the card in the second image, and the shiny golden plastic egg it comes in.
The three circular images at the top of the main puzzle component should — fingers crossed — lead him to the drawer in the kitchen that holds the golden egg. This is another one of those spots where a kid his age just never goes unprompted, but hopefully he recognizes the objects in the pictures and where to find them. Once he’s got the egg, he’ll find the card inside. The card gets placed over a portion of the squiggly black symbols to help complete and clarify the shapes.
The next step isn’t actually visible in the image I posted above; once I printed that image, I drew a thick border around the largest circle with a metallic gold marker. This circle happens to be the same size as one half of the opened gold plastic egg. Once he figures that out and places the egg on the circle, he’ll see that the reflection of the symbols on the page and card can now be read clearly, spelling the word “PRINTER”. Estimated challenge level: 8 out of 10.
PUZZLE #3
I’ll explain this one, but no associated images yet, as there’s no digitally-designed component to it that I can make a screenshot of. The puzzle found at the printer is a more physical one — there’s a long strip of paper that needs to be wrapped around another object to find a hidden message. It’s currently sealed up in an ink cartridge box next to the printer, right out in the open. Not something he’d have any interest in poking around in before the search is on, but still, not actually hidden by any stretch. Estimated challenge level: 7 out of 10.
Anyway, once he figures it out, it’ll send him out to the backyard shed where his mom’s bicycle is kept.
PUZZLE #4
This one is just pure observation and gruntwork. Find all the words in the word search grid, then transcribe the leftover letters into the spaces below. I actually screwed up the letter count when I built this one and misspelled the word “HONeY” in the leftover letters, so I had to give him a free vowel in the eventual puzzle solution. I’m sure he’ll forgive me, as once he solves it, he’s decoding the location of the first Warhammer kit. Estimated challenge level: 3 out of 10.
PUZZLE #5
These three sheets will actually be found separate from one another, alongside the puzzles at some of the previous stops, the last of which is in the cereal box from the previous stop. The paper they’re printed on is relatively lightweight, so if he places them on top of one another, it’ll be fairly obvious where it’s all going. At most, he’ll need to hold them up to a window to let the light shine through, which will make everything that much clearer. The text at the top spells “LOOK WHERE THERE IS ONE”, and the boxes line up to make the image of a set of IKEA Kallax shelves we’ve got standing in our living room.
When combined, there is only a single box that holds only one object — the wide purple rectangle in the bottom right of page 3. This corresponds to a drawer where he’ll find my copy of WONKY, a block-stacking game that comes in a purple pouch like the one in the puzzle. (Incidentally, I also invented that particular game, so I guess I’ve been setting up parts of this puzzle since around 2015.)
Estimated challenge level: 4 out of 10.
PUZZLE #6
The WONKY pouch holds a set of four sleeves for trading card game cards. Each sleeve is a different color, and holds a sticker of a symbol from one of four Magic: the Gathering sets. The colors on the sleeves match those on a (to this point, unsolvable) sheet he’ll have been carrying with him since the very beginning of the hunt.
When he puts the stickers on the corresponding colors of the printed sheet (second of the two images above), he’ll have made a partial map of my collection of Magic cards.
The point where the four given symbols intersect is the box labeled “M20”, right in the center of the shelves. Estimated challenge level: 3 out of 10.
PUZZLE #7
The M20 box has been temporarily vacated of cards to make room for Puzzle #7 (and one of the lottery tickets, and a portion of a future puzzle). This particular one is pretty straightforward: put together five Tetris-like jigsaw puzzle pieces to spell a message: DAD’S RED CHUCKS BY BACK DOOR. The edges are all clean, square cuts though, so there’s no contoured connections to help guide him. It’s going to come down to him realizing the finished shape is meant to be a 5×5 square, and that the other sheet that comes with it is a portion of an incomplete future puzzle. Estimated challenge level: 5 out of 10.
PUZZLE #8
Next to our back door is a wire rack with about a dozen pair of shoes, boots, and whatnot. I’ve got a pair of red Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars that are, at this moment, holding one of the last puzzles of the hunt. Inside the left shoe is a plastic egg with letters and colored shapes drawn on it. Inside the egg is a set of six Scrabble tiles that will, when arranged properly in the vertical spaces on the left of the sheet, spell a word he should be abundantly familiar with (for reasons you’ll see in a minute).
This is where the extra puzzle section from the previous stop comes in. The four pairs of symbols tell him how to line up the halves of the plastic egg, almost like a cryptex. Once everything is aligned properly, he’ll get four words: SEARCH BEHIND SECOND FOUR. Estimated challenge level: 4 out of 10.
PUZZLE #9
Here’s why the six Scrabble tiles should be easy for him to recognize: they spell “FAMILY”, just like the image above. This has been hanging in our front hallway as long as we’ve lived here, and was a prominent feature in each of our homes before this. Heather (my wife) made these oversized Scrabble tiles herself, and fixed them to the wall with Velcro-backed Command strips — meaning that with a little effort, they can be taken down at put back up at will.
As directed by the solution to the previous puzzle, he’ll pull the “second four” — in this case, the letter Y — off the wall to reveal his last puzzle of the morning.
This one’s subtle, but I have faith in him.
He loves the classic board game Clue. It’s maybe the most prized piece in his own board game collection; he bought a copy last year with his allowance money, and he’s really proud of it. If you look closely at the text in the riddle shown here, you’ll notice that the word “Clue” is actually the logo from the cover of the game box. All he has to do is look inside his game, and he’ll find the last Warhammer kit. Estimated challenge level: 4 out of 10.
All in all, I expect the hunt to last him somewhere in the range of an hour or two. As excited as he’ll surely be hunting down prizes, I’m twice as stoked to see him wracking his brains on the puzzles. I have a few pieces to get placed tonight after he goes to bed, and once that’s done, I’m going to have a hard time not waking him up early just to put the first puzzle in his hands.
There will be photos (and possibly videos) of him working on all of this. I’ll try to get them up here as a follow-up post as soon as possible.
Until then, may the mythical rabbit lead you on your own awesome wild goose chases.
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