At Christmas, the Besties gifted us an at home “escape room”. It promised to be perfect entertainment for get togethers and dinner parties. It took us 7 months to organise a date, but mid July, eight of us gathered in the garden to enjoy a bbq and a catch up.

 

As the sun disappeared behind the neighbours trees and shade crept across the patio, we cleared the remnants of our dinner and moved inside to start cracking the clues.

On opening the envelope, we were given a synopsis of our task, together with nine puzzles to solve and a clue as to which one we should start with, which in turn would determine the order in which we should solve the puzzles. Each answer would give us a number between 1 and 100. With a suggested time of 60-90 minutes, we set off on our Chinese journey.

The metro ticket, was our starting point, on the reverse of which were 10 signs of the Chinese zodiac. As each of the other clues had the picture of an animal on, our ticket enabled us to work out in which order we should attempt to solve each of the remaining clues 👍

From celebrating Chinese New Year, with a mathematical puzzle, we moved to folding a parcel label to reveal a sum and the answer to the next clue. A loyalty card for bubble tea purchases kept us guessing for a while and we needed to log on to the website for an additional clue. Easy when you knew where to find the answer 🙄

Moving on to the bookshop, we quickly worked out that we needed to count the fingers of all those wearing turquoise to discover our next number. Problem was all of us thought one of the figures was just holding up 4 fingers and came up with a total of 11. WRONG, she was holding up 6, including her thumbs, so total should have been 13. Should have gone to specsavers 👓.

The year of the horse led us to a greetings card. We followed the letters to read the message on the front. It didn’t reveal a number, neither did the message on the inside 🤔. However once we spotted the message on the back, it led us back to the front of the card to count the letters and give us our required number 👍

Now the goat really stumped us. A menu, one side in English, the other in Chinese. We had to work out the price. We all attempted separately and came up with different answers. Some read it one way, others another. We used Google translate to try to help and we logged on for a couple of extra clues.

We thought we had worked it out and moved along, to the monkey.
A tiny piece of paper, with a little anagram on it and we soon determined it was a red herring 🙄

The rooster made us work a bit harder. First task was to complete a crossword. Secondly we had to answer 3 quick maths questions. The answers to the maths told us which answers from the crossword and in which order we needed to type them into what3words. The coordinates, of which, took us to the Yangjawan Bridge across which the S68 highway passes.

Feeling quite pleased with ourselves, we were ready for the dog. Our time had just ticked over the hour, so we were even happier when he was gentle on us. Solving his clues quite quickly allowed us to move onto our final test.

 

With leaflet in hand we learned a little of Fenhuang, which as it turns out is a real place, however it had no relevance to the game 😂. Our test was to sort our yings from our yangs, our black from our white and our odds from our evens. As you can see from our doodlings it pickled our brains, but eventually we got there and it was time to log in and put our results into the vault to open the final page.

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

In they went, nine numbers from 1-100. Did we have them correct, were they in the right order? As I pushed the return button, 7 turned green and 2 were red 😬. First incorrect one was the bookshop, and as mentioned earlier, we had missed two fingers 🙄. The second was the Chinese menu the goat provided us with. We tried again looking at the clues once more but still came up with the same number 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️.
Sadly we had to resort to revealing the answer.

The vault unlocked and we received our completion message in 1 hour 20 minutes.

We had had a wonderful afternoon, catching up with some of our lovely friends. Chillaxing in the sun in the garden, the hubby bbqing dinner, before heading indoors to tax our brains (after a couple of beverages 🤪).

We unlocked the vault, with a little help from the website (still can’t work out how the answer to the goats menu was 31 🤷‍♀️) and saved the main character from his blunder, sending the correct message to his boyfriend and saved him from getting the sack.

Great way to spend an afternoon and evening.

Check out the games at puzzle post.com