Room Escape Artist

Thirteen Rooms is a puzzle book created by Nomis Piy in Singapore.

Format

Style of Play:

• puzzle book

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience

Required Equipment: computer with internet connection or mobile device, and optionally a pen and paper and/ or tracing paper

Recommended Team Size: 1-2

Play Time: Expect 5-7 hours.

Price: $22.00 plus $10 shipping

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

This is a puzzle book that work your way through, reading the story and solving puzzles. It needs to be solved in sequential order through the 13 rooms.

Once you solve a puzzle, you enter the code on a webpage and your answer will be verified. If you are incorrect, the webpage will simply reload; there is no error given. If you are correct, you will be given additional clues for a later puzzle or moved to the next room. There is a hint page that you access through a QR code in the book.

It is difficult to leave the game and come back, so it’s helpful to keep track of the final code for each room so you can quickly go back to where you left off.

Cindi S’ Reaction

If you’ve done any of the previous Nomis Piy escape puzzle books, you know they are all about the crazy, challenging puzzles. And Thirteen Rooms, their third installment, is no exception, and in my opinion, the most challenging of the three.

The story involved a girl named Mia, who woke up in a locked room and had to puzzle her way through 13 fun, escape-room-themed rooms to learn why she was there, and then to escape. While some of the puzzles clicked with me right away, others were quite difficult and took a lot longer to figure out, even with being familiar with the Nomis Piy puzzle style. In this book, they found new and creative ways to hide clues in plain sight and used included props to get unique, surprising results. As expected, there was often little-to-no information on how to solve a puzzle or where to even start; though frustrating at times, it was also highly satisfying to solve a room and progress to the next one.

The online hints came in handy, and often I just needed that first nudge to move forward. But for some puzzles, if it weren’t for the detailed solutions, I’d still be working on them! I really enjoy the challenge of Nomis Piy puzzle books, and recommend them if you like to give your brain a good workout.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

This game packed an incredible amount of puzzle content in such a small package. The accompanying website provides not only the primary narrative, but occasionally contains the puzzles as well. It is also where the player enters answers to obtain further puzzle clues, and subsequent story.

The puzzles start out fairly easy and self contained, but about halfway through the book, the difficulty increases dramatically. Much more creative and unusual handling of the provided materials is required. Additionally, the player will occasionally need other puzzle solving equipment (such as tracing paper) or some common outside knowledge.

The hint website is good, providing layered hints with a final solution for all except the final puzzle.

I think this book would be enjoyable for a player that is looking for challenging puzzles, and is comfortable breaking puzzle conventions that most other puzzle books follow.

Matthew Stein’s Reaction

Thirteen Rooms packed an impressively layered and insidiously clever amount of puzzling into a slim booklet. Much like Nomis Piy’s previous puzzle books, Missing and Graffiti, Thirteen Rooms was structured around variations on a core puzzle mechanic — in this case, a set of transparency overlays which were used and reused in a multitude of ways. Each transparency at first appeared as a familiar puzzle trope, at least to an experienced puzzler, but the simultaneous constraints and creativity that went into designing them was frankly inspirational.

With this third book, Nomis Piy has firmly established each of their experiences as an aha factory. Nearly every revelation must be earned, and the designers repeatedly not only show off their own cleverness but equally allow solvers to earn and experience it for themselves. Also, as in their previous books, some of these risks didn’t pay off as fully: a handful of puzzles felt ambiguously signposted, the online hint system frequently missed crucial intermediate confirmation, the lack of any online hints for the final puzzle sequence felt unnecessarily cheeky, and an important message hidden in plain sight revealed itself too early while scouring the book for other secrets. Nonetheless, I found Thirteen Rooms to be exceedingly satisfying and well balanced, and I would strongly recommend it to any puzzle lover who doesn’t require easy wins.

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