A beautiful hotel with spotty service.
Location: at home
Date Played: June 27, 2019
Team size: 2-8; we recommend 2-3
Duration: 90 minutes
Price: $24.99
REA Reaction
Escape from the Grand Hotel was Professor Puzzle’s first foray into tabletop escape games… and they got a lot right.
The printed materials and package design were beautiful.
The gameplay took some clear inspiration from the ThinkFun tabletop escape games, using location envelopes and paper components to tell a puzzle-driven narrative. Their approach to answer verification was clever.
Professor Puzzle stumbled with hinting and editing. Bluntly, this game felt under playtested. There were too many little problems that were easily fixable. The hint system was innovative, but insufficient.
There are some interesting ideas and a lot of great execution in Escape from the Grand Hotel. If you really enjoy tabletop escape games, this one had a lot to offer. However, there were too many little flaws and gaps that got amplified by the limited hint system for me to comfortably recommend this to a tabletop escape game newbie.
Who is this for?
- Story seekers
- Puzzle lovers
- Players with at least some experience
Why play?
- Beautiful game materials
- The structure and gameflow
- The answer mechanic
- The opportunity to make an evening of a tabletop puzzle game
Story
The storied Grand Hotel was once the place for the rich and famous to visit. After decades of disrepair, the mysterious and wealthy Blossom family had restored the hotel to its former glory. We were invited to its grand reopening.
Setup
Escape from the Grand Hotel had an interesting structure.
Each player received an invitation. This included character information and encouraged costuming. (We didn’t really use any of this because we didn’t realize it was an option until we already had our friends over and the box open.)
Once we began, we unfolded the beautifully printed cardstock hotel settings. We could observe what was in each space. In many, we also found additional paper items (puzzle pieces).
If we solved a puzzle, it would resolve to a clue to the next location within the hotel for us to visit. Sometimes this meant that we derived a room number. Other times we uncovered a more cryptic clue like the color of one of the doors or some other descriptor.
If we needed a hint, we could unfold one from the location. Interestingly, the hints were usually puzzles in and of themselves… puzzles without their own hints.
Gameplay
Professor Puzzle’s Escape from the Grand Hotel was a standard play-at-home escape game with a moderate to high level of difficulty. If you’re comfortable with tabletop escape room puzzles, this was moderately difficult. If you aren’t comfortable with the format, the limited hinting could make this game quite challenging.
Professor Puzzle also encouraged making the game into an event by providing character roles.
Core gameplay revolved around searching, observing, making connections, and puzzling.
Analysis
➕ We enjoyed the structure of Escape from the Grand Hotel. Each puzzle led us to another room in the hotel. It was fun to explore the hotel in this way.
➕ The first puzzle worked well for onboarding players. It wasn’t too challenging. Through it we understood how Escape from the Grand Hotel wanted us to play it.
➕ The solution mechanism was fantastic. The idea that the puzzle solutions alluded to the next area of the game was a smart twist on the tabletop escape game format. This approach allowed Professor Puzzle to strip out artificial answer checking mechanisms and keep things in-world.
➖ We encountered some taxonomy inconsistencies within the in-game instructions. The way that it referred to things sometimes shifted. This got confusing.
➕ Professor Puzzle designed a beautiful product with high-quality printed materials. From the box to the game components it looked and felt great. We especially enjoyed the illustrations of the rooms in the hotel. We really loved the box.
➖ Although the artwork was beautiful, it included a visual variance that factored into the gameplay. Cluing needed to match the artwork, or vice versa.
➕ Escape from the Grand Hotel included a variety of puzzles of different types and difficulties.
➖ In some instances, the puzzles needed additional cluing.
➖ In one instance, ambiguous wording turned the final stages of a complex puzzle into trial and error. This got old quickly.
➕ Professor Puzzle provided duplicate copies of one of the more tedious puzzles so that more players could participate.
➖ The hint for each puzzle was concealed in a pocket in each “room” we entered. Although we liked this presentation of hints, Professor Puzzle included only one hint per puzzle, which was insufficient. The hint system needed far more granularity. In some instances, the hints themselves were puzzles and they didn’t have hints for themselves.
➕ The story was hokey, but it came together well enough in the end. It worked for the game and made us smile in the end.
➕ Professor Puzzle encourages players to make an evening of Escape from the Grand Hotel. They included invitations to mail to guests, who can come in character and in costume. This would be a fun way to make a play-at-home puzzle game into a bigger event.
➖ While character roles were fun, they were not relevant to the gameplay.
➖ It wasn’t clear that those character invitations were even an option until we had started the game.
➖ Although the game can be played without destroying any of the components, it didn’t provide reset instructions. We were able to pack it up correctly by referencing the solutions guide, but without instructions, we had to repack one puzzle in the solved state.
➕ Escape from the Grand Hotel required only the materials in the box. It did not require an app download or internet connection.
Tips For Player
- Space Requirements: a small table
- Required Gear: pen and paper
- To make a larger event around this game, mail out the enclosed invitations and have your guests arrive in character and in costume. Note, the character roles are entirely for fun and are not relevant to the gameplay.
Buy your copy of Professor Puzzle’s Escape from the Grand Hotel, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Disclosure: Professor Puzzle provided a sample for review.
(If you purchase via our Amazon links, you will help support Room Escape Artist as we will receive a very small percentage of the sale. We appreciate the support.)
Your experience of this game is very similar to ours, but we found the game far too easy, until we got to the coded fax. This puzzle made absolutely no sense – even after reading the supposed answer. Any chance you can explain it to us?
We didn’t find a clued way to solve this. For us, it was simply a search puzzle… with a lot of searching.
The lobby puzzle makes no sense at all the code breaker does not work, the clue is incorrect and the incorrect 99 answer still makes no sense to us.
Everything did solve for us. We didn’t like how it all solved, but we got to the solution. Still, there could be variation in production.
did you by any chance come up with a logical reason why the four numbers in the lobby room 118 were chosen and where they are seen in the grouping identified? Thanks Robert Cook
Unfortunately it’s been too long since we played, and we don’t have the game here anymore. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.
Agreed, that’s precisely the conclusion we came to. Maybe there was a faulty batch?
THANK YOU!! This has been driving me insane
It certainly happens 🙁
i purchased a version of this game however ours doesnt include invites or character info.. would anyone be able to email them to me??
We don’t have it anymore. Someone from the maker, Professor Puzzle might be able to help. https://professorpuzzle.com/about/contact/
That said, I don’t think that the characters/ invites are worth the effort. They do not impact the game in any meaningful way.
The Professor Puzzle website does contain a pdf you can print and cut out the eight invites. (I received a duplicate invite and was missing one). However, it is not under Solutions on their website; go to Products, Puzzles, Escape, Grand Hotel and you’ll see a link to download.
Also, I’ve seen videos where they indicate they change puzzles and a different version 2 or version 3 of the game is released.
That’s good to know. We had tested version one.