Envy

Website: https://lockpaperscissors.co/envy/

Players: we had 3 solvers

Time: took us 35 minutes

Lock Paper Scissors offers a number of escape kits – these print and play activities help your “transform your home into an immersive adventure”.  They currently offer 6 different kits, each with a different theme.  When you buy the kit, you’ll download all the files needed.  The main escape room is found in one .pdf – this one spans 17 pages.  If you look through the file archive, you’ll also find plenty of other files to help you transform your room with the theme – posters, costumes and other props can also be printed out!

Envy is a  “1920’s Gatbsy style murder mystery game of debaucherous luxury and deadly feuds. Get ready for a night of velvet gloves”  The illustrious Carnegie family are hosting a giant party of frivolity, laughter and a few spiked drinks. From Gatsby to Governors, everyone’s invited for the riotous affair. Unfortunately, the bloodied dead body suggests there are one too many guests. Was it a jealous lover? Or filthy blackmail? Or plain old fashioned Envy?

The story is the driving feature of this puzzle, and as you go thru the puzzles, you’ll learn a little bit more about the murder. To play, simply place the whole stack of puzzles on the table at once, and have at it!  You’ll likely want to have pens, pencils, paper, tape and scissors around for these.  AS far as we could tell, there isn’t a specific order that you needed to solve the puzzles in – the overarching structure was solving a bunch of puzzles to combine into the final Police Report.

We had three veteran puzzlers on hand when we tried this one, and it took us about 35 minutes. We did use the included Spotify playlist to further the mood and theme. We took the head on approach with each of us grabbing puzzles at random at first, and if we were able to solve them quickly, we did so.  The ones which weren’t immediately “seen” were passed around.  In the end, we did not require any hints (Which are found on an online site) – though after our game we looked at the hints and they certainly seemed appropriate with one hint offered before the solution is given.

Overall, there was a nice variety of puzzles, and anyone who has done paper and pencil escape rooms will likely recognize the style of a number of the puzzles. We found the overall difficulty level to be fairly easy; again we did not require hints for any of the puzzles. On my personal scale of 1 to 10, I’d give the difficulty here about a 4 – but they were enjoyable to solve.

Given the amount of other material provided here and the easier level, this would be a good choice for hosting a theme party for non-gamers.  Folks that aren’t too experienced with puzzles and escape rooms would probably find this a nice challenge.  The files allow you to edit them, and you can even customize some of the puzzles.  That’s a really nice touch for this sort of kit.  You could probably split your guests into groups of 2 or 3 and have them race against each other.  

Given that an in-person escape room can run up to $25 per person; you can spend that amount to get a kit that multiple people can enjoy – for around the same amount of time.  Sure, you have to do a bit of work to make it happen, but this is a nice way to spend an evening, and something that you might be able to build a whole night around.  With the holidays coming up, one of their escape kits might be a great way to get the family together for a joint activity.  

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor