Escape Room Printable Detective Case File, Print at Home Murder Mystery Puzzle Game for Adults and Teens, Hints and Answers PDF

Instant download · 39-page PDF · US Letter · print it as often as you like

One case, nine puzzles, an evening at the table. Print it at home, spread it on the table and work it out. No props, no scissors, no app, no padlocks, and nothing to buy after you have bought this.

Sir Everard Thane collected maps. On the last evening of the house party he took his coffee into the library at Ashcombe Hall, turned the key behind him, and was not seen alive again. There was no violence and nothing was disturbed, and the doctor in the house signed a note about the heart. His solicitor does not agree — and there is a letter in the wall safe, put there three weeks before, naming the person Sir Everard had begun to be afraid of.

The safe takes four figures. You have nine pages out of his folder.

HOW IT WORKS

Nine puzzles, and nine different kinds — a logic grid, a word search, a kakuro, a nonogram, a sudoku, a maze, a shift cipher, a verse and a keyed letter square. Each one prints its own rule for reading a single character off its own answer: four of them give you a figure of the safe code, five give you a letter of a name. Fill the nine boxes on the Case Summary sheet, read them in the order the sheet tells you, and the safe opens.

No puzzle needs the answer to any other puzzle. That is deliberate: a table of six can split up and work in parallel, and the one puzzle nobody at the table likes cannot stop the game.

WHAT'S IN THE FILE

- 9 puzzle pages (pages 7–16) — the logic grid takes two, the clue list on one sheet and the grid on the next.
- The briefing (page 6): the house, the six people in it, and what you are looking for.
- A one-page host guide (page 5). That is the whole of the setting up. There is no script to read aloud and nobody has to act a part.
- The Case Summary (page 17) — the board. Nine boxes, four for a figure and five for a letter, and the rule for putting them together.
- A hint page for every puzzle (pages 18–26), one puzzle to a page, so nobody can see a puzzle they have not reached. Two nudges above a fold line, the answer below it.
- A full walkthrough (pages 27–37): not just the answer, but how each answer is forced, step by step — the logic grid gets its whole clue-by-clue reasoning printed out.
- The letter in the safe (page 38), and a page that names every program that made and checked every puzzle (page 39).

MACHINE-CHECKED, NOT CLAIMED

This is the part that is hard to buy anywhere else. Six of the nine puzzles were made by the same computer programs that produce the puzzle books published under this imprint, and each was put through that project's own acceptance checks before it was allowed into this file:

- The logic grid has exactly one solution (counted), a second independent brute-force count agrees, a deduction-only solver reaches it with no guessing, and no clue is redundant — remove any one of its 20 clues and the case stops having a single answer.
- The kakuro is proved unique twice over, by two counters that share no code, and solved by a deduction engine that never guesses.
- The nonogram is proved unique on its rows, again on its columns as an independent second pass, and again by brute force, and it comes out line by line with no guessing.
- The sudoku is proved unique and finished by a solver that only uses techniques a person uses.
- The word search passes the generator's own gate: every one of the 15 titles appears exactly once, and a second, dumber search re-proves it.
- The maze is proved to be a perfect maze — connected, and with no loop anywhere in it — which is what makes the one route through it the only one.

The three hand-built puzzles are held to the same standard: the cipher is tested against all 26 shifts and only one of them reads as English, the verse is tested against all twelve figures on a clock face and only one fits it, and the letter square is checked to hold all 25 letters once each.

And the chain itself is checked end to end. A test program solves all nine puzzles from the printed page, applies each page's own printed extraction rule to its own solution, and assembles the nine characters. If any puzzle had two answers, or any rule could be read two ways, the file would not have been built.

PRINTING

US Letter, portrait, single-sided, the same margin left and right. Print at 100% / "Actual size" with "Fit to page" off. Black ink on white — there is not one drop of colour anywhere in the file, so a mono laser printer loses nothing. Nothing on any page comes within 0.6 in of a paper edge. Page 3 is a one-page print guide with the ranges: print pages 6–17 and your players have everything they need and nothing that would spoil it.

WHAT YOU MAY DO WITH IT

Print it as often as you like for yourself and your own household, and print copies for one group you run yourself — a classroom, a library or community club, a care-home or day-centre activity session, a youth group, a family gathering. You may not resell or give away the file, sell the printed pages, or put the puzzles into anything you sell. The full licence is page 4 of the PDF.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

- A PDF to print. Not a physical box, not an app, nothing is mailed, no website to log into.
- Not a murder-mystery party kit: there are no roles to act and no host script. This is pencil-and-paper puzzling with a whodunit wrapped round it.
- Not a set of real locks. The "safe" is a page in the file.
- Not editable or fillable on screen. Solve it on paper.
- Not a reprint. Nothing in this file appears in the Armchair Detective logic-grid casebooks; this case and all nine of its puzzles were made for this file.
- One case, not a book of cases. When it is solved, it is solved.
- Not timed for you. Nine puzzles is an evening for most tables, but nobody has run a stopwatch over it, so we will not print a number we cannot stand behind. You set the pace, and the puzzles are independent, so you can stop and come back.

BLOODLESS

Nobody is described and nothing is shown. The whole of the unpleasantness happens before page one, off the page, in a locked room nobody goes into. Fine for teenagers and for a family table.

HOW THIS WAS MADE

The nine puzzles were generated, solved and checked by computer programs written for this series, in the same way a crossword compiler produces a crossword. The case itself — the house, the people, the sentences — was written from the same templates the mystery series uses, with the help of an AI assistant. Page 2 of the file says so in the same words.