Epic Escapes - "The Chemist’s Conundrum"

Helen Bailey

Jul 27, 20223 min read

Updated: Apr 24, 2024

Photo above is property of Epic Escapes

Company: Epic Escapes

Game: The Chemist's Conundrum

Country: United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Language: English

Type of Game: DIY Escape Kits 🖨️✂

Genre: Science

Date Played: July 16, 2022

Difficulty (based on 5 players): 8/10

Size of Team: 1-6 Players

Time: 60 Minutes

Price: £14.97

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You are a Chemist (or several Chemists!) at the top of your field but are looking for something to push you further. You spot an advert to go and work with the famous Dr. Vincent MacAlistair who has written some incredible papers recently. You’ve made it to the interview and excitedly arrived in a room with other top scientists and met by the famous Doctor, who says a few words and promptly leaves the room, shouting as he leaves “Read the letter with a circle!”. You glance down at the puzzling papers with an uneasy feeling as an ominous hissing noise begins, and decide that if you’re in with a chance of passing, or getting out of here, you’d better get solving!

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The PDF is emailed to you and it's 15 pages long. There is no need to cut anything out, but you might want to print a few of the pages to use a pencil on, or if you have a touchscreen laptop you could digitally write on the documents. If all else fails, you can recreate the pages that needs to be drawn on manually!

Your task is to solve the 9 conundrums left to you, the answers to each will give you a chemical element. Each puzzle (or puzzle and related information) is marked with a different symbol to identify them easily and make sure you don’t miss anything vital.

Once you have identified all the elements, you have some further manipulation of the answers to do to get to your final goal…. The 4-digit code to get out of here!!

Hints are sent to you as a separate document, as are the solutions to the puzzles, so no peeking before you start! That said, the hints (of which there are 3 for each puzzle, are encoded with a Caesar Cypher (free puzzle!) so you have to work them out to see them, or you can scan the QR codes to read them on the web.

You don’t have to solve the puzzles in any particular order - so you can work through them in any order as a team, or even split them up between members of the group if you so wish, whatever works for you.

Photo above is property of Epic Escapes

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We found a few of the puzzles quite difficult! It was nice to be challenged - and it lives up to it's title with a heavy lean towards chemistry themes with a lot of math involved!

We went down a rabbit-hole a few times, and some puzzles have a much more obvious “in” than others, but with just a couple of hints used in the whole game (and a little bit of outside Googling and internet assistance) we got there.

There’s a nice mix of codes, maths, deduction and visual puzzles. A couple of the puzzles went right over my head, but the nice thing was that with a team playing, there was always someone who worked out what to do and then we were off. The deduction puzzle was perfectly split between 5 of us with everyone taking a different piece of the information and got into a nice rhythm communicating.

Photo above is property of Epic Escapes

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The second in the print-n-cut series from this lovely UK creator, this certainly kept us engaged and worked our brains. Anyone with a love of science, maths, and code-based puzzles will have a lot of fun with this. If you submit your completion time on the website where you check your final answer, you are entered into a draw to win a free game!

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(If you do decide to try this experience, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)

Disclosure: We thank Epic Escapes for providing us with a sample of their game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.