Escape Room Logic Puzzles is a puzzle book written by Francis Heaney and Scott Weiss.
Format
Style of Play:
- Puzzle book
Who is it For?
- Puzzle lovers
- Best for players with at least some experience
- Those who like a challenge
This book is best for people who like the thrill of working on challenging logic problems. You don’t have to be familiar with escape rooms to do these puzzles.
Required Equipment: Pencil and paper… This book is meant to be written in as you solve the puzzles. Extra paper is helpful but not necessary.
Recommended Team Size: 1-2
Play Time: many, many hours
Price: $11.99
Booking: purchase and play at your leisure
Description
Escape Room Logic Puzzles is a book of logic puzzles and other brainteasers built around the theme of escape rooms. It offers 50+ pages of challenging logic problems and puzzle hunt-style puzzles, all wrapped in a loose story of friends playing escape rooms, grabbing a snack between escape rooms, and of course, the all-too-familiar escape room scheduling puzzle. The back of the book has hints, an answer checker section, and lengthy answer explanations for each puzzle.
Cindi S’ Reaction
I’ve always been a fan of the grid-based logic puzzles found in many puzzle magazines, but this collection takes logic puzzles to a whole new level. Escape Room Logic Puzzles contains 50 puzzles of various themes and complexity packed in a thin spiral book, with most going way beyond the typical format. A running narrative about a group of escape room enthusiasts playing rooms all over town connects the puzzles, but make no mistake – these are not puzzles you’d typically find in an escape room. While some puzzles took less than a minute to solve, others I worked on for a couple of hours, and still others were so difficult… I couldn’t figure them out. When I did solve one of the complex puzzles, it felt like a huge achievement. Overall, this book is not for the novice puzzler; I would only recommend it for those who really enjoy challenging logic puzzles with the bonus of escape room flavor.
Sarah Willson’s Reaction
As an escape room enthusiast who has enjoyed logic puzzles for decades, I found these puzzles fun and expertly designed, but also extremely challenging. Their difficulty level is more on par with puzzle hunts than escape rooms or logic puzzle magazines, and they sometimes use outside references and puzzle hunt conventions such as indexing. Some of the traditional logic puzzles in the first half of the book were brilliant and fun to solve (even if they did take upwards of an hour), but by the second half I was feeling out of my depth. I appreciated that the book includes hints for certain puzzles and a comprehensive walkthrough of each puzzle’s answer, especially for the later ones that were too hard for me. I do wish the difficulty level had been indicated somewhere, but I think this book has a lot to offer advanced solvers.
Theresa W’s Reaction
Escape Room Logic Puzzles took me by surprise. Typically I’m a pretty strong logic puzzle solver and I can usually blow through logic grids. If they’re more complex, I usually have a path forward. A good chunk of the puzzles in this book were a much higher difficulty than most logic books, with incredibly rewarding aha moments when you solve something.
On the other hand, the puzzles that stump you are difficult to get your bearings in and figure out any path forward. Even with the hint section in the back of the book, the hints are provided as walkthroughs and sometimes spoil the puzzle by just opening the book to the page. The answer checking section is easy to use, but it is sometimes unclear exactly how to check a puzzle when you’re finished with it. There is a section with some chess puzzles in it, which are not my forte. Thankfully these are labeled, and you can skip them if you’d like (I couldn’t figure out the first place to start with some of them, as my chess knowledge is incredibly lacking). I really wish every puzzle had an option for one more hint to make it slightly easier, instead of just giving a walkthrough. (Some of them do, and some do not.)
I really love the concept of this book, and the story is equal parts hilarious and silly. The designers implemented varied puzzles types too that strayed from the typical logic grid, which was impressive and creative.
Disclosure: The authors provided the Hivemind reviewers with complimentary copies.