Mini Escape Room Printable, Print at Home Detective Mystery Puzzle Game for Adults and Teens, 3 Puzzles with Hints and Answers

Instant download · 16-page PDF · US Letter · print it as often as you like

One short case, 3 puzzles, one three-letter lock. 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.

The Pelham Rooms are two floors of a narrow building on a market square, and the one thing in them worth stealing is the silver-gilt cup in the glass case in the hall. On the members' evening the lights failed. When they came back on the case was standing open and the cup was gone.

The curator kept her working notes in a deed box under the counter, and the deed box takes three letters rather than three figures. She is away. Three pages out of her folder are on the table.

HOW IT WORKS

Three puzzles, and three different kinds — a logic grid, a picture puzzle and a cipher. Each one prints its own rule for reading a single letter off its own answer, and the rules are all different in shape: one reads a value out of the finished grid, one is a picture that comes out as a capital letter, one is the last letter of the last word of a decoded note. Write the three letters in the three boxes on the Lock Sheet, read them in order, and the box opens.

No puzzle needs the answer to any other puzzle. A table 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

- 3 puzzle pages (pages 7–9), one puzzle to a sheet.
- The briefing (page 6): the building, the four 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 Lock Sheet (page 10) — the board. Three boxes and the rule for putting them together.
- A hint page for every puzzle (pages 11–13), 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 14–15): 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, and page 15 names the program that made and checked each puzzle.
- The note in the box (page 16), which is the end of the case.

MACHINE-CHECKED, NOT CLAIMED

- 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 9 clues and the case stops having a single answer. One more check is this file's own: no single clue joins the two things the page's rule joins, so the answer cannot be read off a line without solving the grid.
- The picture puzzle is proved unique on its rows, again on its columns as an independent second pass, and again by a brute force that tries every filling, and it comes out line by line with no guessing.
- The cipher is tested against all 52 readings a solver could try — the 26 ways of moving the alphabet along, and the same 26 with the alphabet turned back to front — and only the one the page tells you to use reads as English.

And the chain itself is checked end to end. A test program solves all three puzzles from the printed page, applies each page's own printed rule to its own solution, and puts the three letters together. If any puzzle had two answers, or any rule could be read two ways, the file would not have been built. Every surname in the cast is three letters long, so the answer cannot be guessed off the list of people either.

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 6–10 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 "lock" is a page in the file.
- Not editable or fillable on screen. Solve it on paper.
- One short case, not a book of cases. When it is solved, it is solved — and it is the small one. If you want a long evening, The Armchair Detective Case File — The Ashcombe Hall Affair is the full-length case: nine puzzles, a four-figure safe and a surname, 39 pages. It is a separate file and a separate purchase.
- Not clocked for you. Three puzzles is part of an evening for most tables, but nobody has sat over it with a clock and we will not print a number we cannot stand behind.

NOBODY IS HURT IN IT

This one is a theft, not a death. Nothing is described and nothing is shown, and the whole of it happens before page one. Fine for teenagers and for a family table.

HOW THIS WAS MADE

The two generated puzzles were made, solved and checked by computer programs written for this series, in the same way a crossword compiler produces a crossword. The case itself — the building, 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.