Three Wolf Moon Puzzle
Location: at home
Date Played: March 2020
Team size: We recommend 1-4
Duration: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Price: about $25
Publisher: Ravensburger
REA Reaction
With its nature scene in shades of blues, teals, and greens, The Curse of the Wolves was a beautiful jigsaw puzzle with the most innovative and advanced collection of escape puzzles that we’ve seen in a US-released Ravensburger Escape Puzzle to date.
While this puzzle was given the same difficulty rating as Forbidden Basement, it was substantially more challenging than the other puzzles in the Escape Puzzle series. It wasn’t even close. The Curse of the Wolves was a harder jigsaw puzzle. It was also more difficult to find the escape puzzles with the puzzle, and a few of them were considerably harder to solve than in previous installments of the Escape Puzzle series. That’s not a knock against it. We enjoyed the elevated challenge… but it would have been nice if it were labeled appropriately.
Our biggest knock against this product was a stretch of the top edge that was nearly impossible to solve 100% correctly (because all edge pieces interconnect) that we got it approximately correct and stopped caring. There was far too much visual noise in this segment.
Overall, The Curse of the Wolves took a lot more time and effort to solve than previous Escape Puzzles. We welcomed that challenge. We highly recommend it if you’re already comfortable with and enjoy Ravensburger’s Escape Puzzle format. If you’re new to Ravensburger’s Escape Puzzle series, please don’t start here. Try out the Space Observatory for a fantastic starting place.
Series Overview
This review only covers details specific to this individual Ravensburger Escape Puzzle.
For a detailed explanation of the concept and mechanics, and a general analysis of the entire product line, check out our Ravensburger Escape Puzzle Overview.
Story
Lost in the woods and encircled by cursed wolves, with meal time rapidly approaching, could we break their spell?
Analysis
➕ The puzzle art was beautiful. We loved the colors. It was a lovely image to construct as a jigsaw.
➕ This puzzle hid the escape puzzles in the jigsaw puzzle far better than any of the previous Escape Puzzles that we’ve reviewed. We really had to study the image to solve this puzzle.
➖ Ravensburger’s difficulty rating doesn’t appear to have meaning. The company rates both The Curse of the Wolves and Forbidden Basement as “level 3” in difficulty. However, The Curse of the Wolves was far more challenging.
➖ A portion of the top edge was so visually noisy that we found it impossible to solve correctly. Because every edge piece fits into every other edge piece, solvers must rely on visual cues alone. We knew that we had mistakes in that stretch of pieces. While this didn’t impact our solving of the escape puzzles, it did impact our satisfaction with the jigsaw portion.
➕ Ravensburger created some innovative escape puzzles. One favorite especially caught our eye; another favorite took us in a new direction.
➖A few of the puzzles required logic leaps. Although with enough trial and error we always landed at the solution, these puzzles would have been more satisfying with additional clue structure.
➕ The hints were detailed and clear (even if a small, inconsequential segment wasn’t fully translated into English).
➕/➖ The meta puzzle was satisfying from a narrative perspective. That said, it was too easy to recognize too early on. We fully solved it about 25% into the assembly of the jigsaw.
➖ The Curse of the Wolves Escape Puzzle was too easy to backsolve. Because of the way the escape puzzles build into a meta puzzle, this compounded on itself. The more we solved, the more we could backsolve.
❓ The Curse of the Wolves Escape Puzzle relied more heavily on color than some of the other puzzles in the series. If you suffer from colorblindness, this puzzle will be especially challenging.
Buy It Now
Pickup your copy of Ravensburger’s The Curse of the Wolves Escape Puzzle, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Disclosure: Ravensburger provided a sample for review.
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