It’s become an annual tradition for me and my friends to go to an odd desert cabin in Joshua Tree every Autumn and do some casual LARPing. Each year we pick a different theme, we all make up characters, and then one member of the friendgroup cooks up a series of activites or a story for us to play out together. This year I volunteered to be in charge of activities and decided to design my friends an immersive Puzzle Box Escape Room style experience that would fill up the better part of our two day trip. And though I had a whole year to prepare, in classic Jacob fashion I only gave myself 6 weeks to pull it off.
The idea was to design a loosely 60s inspired Scooby Doo esque mystery for my friends to solve. They would all be members of the Cryptic Crew, a mystery solving adventuring team, who had been summoned to the desert after their fellow team member Rita Bravado sent out a distress signal while questing for an elusive treasure artifact called the Golden Viper. They’d arrive at the Coyote Inn — a popular Desert hub for Cryptic Crew Members — and be hosted by the hapless innkeeper Benji Ascott while tracking down Rita’s whereabouts. I played the role of Benji Ascott which allowed me to be present for the whole puzzle solving experience and provide clues/hints if needed, but otherwise just play a comic observer role while the team worked their puzzle solving magic.
The Escape Room experience was divided into five distinct Puzzle Box Chapters (each of which was comprised of 1-3 puzzle lockboxes that needed to be opened), as well as transitional activities between each Chapter like playing card games, painting watercolors, or hunting for treasures hidden outside in the desert. The completion of each Chapter was marked by unlocking a tape left behind by Rita Bravado which could be played back in a tape recorder to help the players piece together what happened to Rita during her time at the Coyote Inn.
This experience was a whirlwind to assemble as I pieced together off-the-shelf locks and lockboxes with custom 3D printed and vinyl cut assets. The final experience wound up being over four hours of total puzzle solving playtime as the players worked together to solve over 20 puzzles spread out over 10 lockboxes. And I’m very proud to share that the experience went off without a single game-breaking snag.
This was an enormous labor of love and made for a legendary weekend with my friends. And now I have all these really great puzzle boxes just floating around, ready for more players to give them a try…
It’s every puzzle designer’s dream to get a reaction like this to solving a puzzle:
If you’d like to read the full planning documentation of what it takes to pull off something like this, I’ve uploaded my full planning document here! It’s a bit of mess (as all planning documents are), but it shows what the heck I was thinking when piecing this together. In short, checklists were my best friend.