The clock ticks down. You are on an escape room adventure with your friends and as you search for clues, you stumble upon a door. You open it and… You’re faced with a wall covered in a cipher—lines and lines of codes. This will take at least 10 minutes! Now: who among your friends gets… Read more →
In every Society of Curiosities game, we like to include a tangible item that is custom designed. For our first solve the mystery game, Madok’s Lost Treasure, players go on a quest for pirate treasure – and of course we wanted pirate gold! Mystery in a Box Design Challenges Our goal in creating a custom… Read more →
A behind the scenes look of the creation of our solve the mystery – escape room style game, The Memory Stone.
We design both escape games and mail-order alternate reality games. In both, providing hints is essential to smooth gameplay. Our Guidelines for Creating Hints in Escape Games Hints must be straightforward. People are using hints because they feel stuck. We’ve been in situations where we ask for a hint and get a riddle back or… Read more →
A ton of research goes into each episode of the Society of Curiosities. Some ideas never see the light of day and some are present in the backstory, but barely visible. We wanted to feature a few more fun facts that we’ve recently come across. Hidden Brain! Some say that Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on… Read more →
Let’s jump right in: The Hawthorne Effect causes people to behave differently when they know they’re being observed. A Little History The Hawthorne Effect was named after a study at an electric plant, Hawthorne Works, in the early 1920s. Researchers wanted to determine how lighting impacted productivity and found that all lighting changes increased productivity…. Read more →
There’s a certain amount of breath-holding when we submit a game for review. Although our team has designed over ten escape games and we’d consider ourselves seasoned escape game designers, a new game always holds the unknown when presented to escape game reviewers. We’re happy to announce two more rave reviews – whew!!!! A huge… Read more →
We had the pleasure of chatting with the ESCAPETHEROOMers. Hold onto your hats as we discuss our wild ride of launching the Society of Curiosities mystery game in the midst of a Pandemic! Fun Fact: We had been researching the game box subscription market for two years and began planning our game in November of… Read more →
The Society of Curiosities offers immersive play-at-home games. That can be difficult to achieve. After all, we’re not there, in person, to aid players and guide gameplay. So how do we ensure our mystery in a box experience is consistent and exceptional? Well, it’s a lot of work! We do a lot of design work… Read more →
We got our start commercially as escape room game designers. It was more difficult than we thought to make the jump from escape room designers to creators of game subscription boxes. Here’s how we did it.
