Room Escape Artist

“I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome…to my house” -Bram Stoker

Location:  At home

Date Played: March 28, 2025

Team size: We recommend 1-2

Duration: 90-120 minutes

Price: $44.99 + $7 shipping

REA Reaction

The Conundrum Box provided more than just a tabletop puzzle game. Escape from Castle Dracula also included a soundtrack to provide a spooky ambience and themed recipe suggestions to turn the game into a full evening affair. Before playing, we enjoyed the recommended three course dinner with pumpkin tomato soup, ghoul-ash, and butterscotch apple crisp served alongside the Vampire’s Embrace cocktail. The food and cocktails were delicious; however, our party of two was left with copious amounts of leftovers.

As a game, Escape from Castle Dracula was a standard tabletop experience with primarily paper components. We played this game with our foster cat Megara (her friends call her Meg). We enjoyed the story, which had moments of tension and progressed by opening additional envelopes with new puzzle materials. Additionally, we were grateful that voice over was available for the story to reduce the amount of reading, albeit the voice over was fairly monotone.

In general, the puzzles were logical and we appreciated the multi-step puzzles which required synthesizing information from multiple documents. However, there were two mistakes in the printed materials: one which was noted during game play and one which was minor enough that we were still able to solve the puzzle. The puzzling was also completely linear making the ideal group size for playing the game (2 players) at odds with the expected group size for the recipes (4-6 people).

In summary, we loved the holistic experience provided by The Conundrum Box with their game Escape from Castle Dracula. The dinner, drinks, soundtrack, and game combined into a fun date night. However, we would have preferred either recipes with smaller serving sizes or a more non-linear game to better match the ideal number of players with the amount of food.

Who is this for?

• Story Seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Vampire Fans
• Any experience level

Why play?

• Solve logical and varied puzzles
• Partake in a dramatic story that progresses to an exciting conclusion
• Enjoy a curated date night experience: dinner, drinks, and puzzles

Story

A fellow member of the Great Explorers Society had approached us to look into the writings of one Arthur Van Helsing who believed that an ancient vampire lived in the foothills of Transylvania. This rumor piqued our interest, so we packed our things and set off to vanquish this menace.

Setup

After we pulled up the website for Escape from Castle Dracula we chose to embark upon the full The Conundrum Box experience. We started by downloading all of the food and drink recipes and went shopping for the ingredients we needed for the meal.

The food recipes included a soup, main course, and dessert. For drinks there were two alcoholic options and one non-alcoholic punch. They were all themed around vampires, autumn, or eastern-European cuisine. The food and drinks were easy to make and tasty to consume. The ability to make Escape from Castle Dracula into a full evening event made this fairly standard tabletop puzzle game into a truly memorable affair.

After dinner, we gathered back around the computer, pulled up the themed playlist, and started the puzzle portion of the adventure. The website provided an intro puzzle and then laid out the story before us. Internet access was required to interact with the game. As we solved puzzles, we opened new sealed envelopes and the story progressed.

We needed scissors, paper, and a writing utensil.

Gameplay

The Conundrum Box’s Escape from Castle Dracula was a play-at-home escape game with a moderate level of difficulty. There was a healthy variety of puzzles including visual connection, decoding, and logic.

The gameplay was linear and relied on entering passcodes into webpages to advance the story. The webpages also instructed us when to open the sealed envelopes containing additional puzzle components. Each puzzle had a series of hints available to assist us if we got stuck.

Analysis

➕ The story of Escape from Castle Dracula was exciting and provided a sense of progression, with increasing tension, and a satisfying resolution.

➕ The puzzles included were generally logical and straightforward. There were several multi-step puzzles that required us to use multiple documents to solve the challenge at hand and provided us with some fun aha moments.

➖ One puzzle frustrated us because the game material was so busy that it was nearly impossible to see the information needed to proceed.

➕/➖ The curated food, drinks, and music were tasty and thematic. However, the portion size in the recipes was too large for the recommended number of players for the game. We would have preferred either recipes with smaller serving sizes or a more non-linear game suited for more players.

➕/➖ Each webpage was narrated, which reduced the amount of required reading, but the monotone voice that was chosen for the narration detracted from some of the exciting and tense moments.

➖ There were two mistakes in the documents provided. One was noted on the webpage (and is fixed in the new printing), and the other was minor and didn’t prevent us from solving the puzzle.

🐣There were some story references from prior Conundrum Box games. These references could be fun Easter eggs for those who had played the previous games, but weren’t important enough to necessitate playing the prior adventures before Escape from Castle Dracula.

Tips For Players

• Space Requirements: Coffee Table
• Required Gear: Internet-connected device, scissors, paper, and a writing utensil

Buy your copy of The Conundrum Box’s Escape from Castle Dracula, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.