Christmas jigsaw escape game

This is one that I got for Christmas and completed a couple of weeks ago with some help from my friend. It was actually really tricky. A bit like a wasgij the picture on the box didn’t match the picture you were trying to create. The idea is that once you’ve made up the jigsaw there will also be 8 challenges hidden within the jigsaw that you have to solve - in this case to find the cure to your illness and escape the witches room. Here’s the box

 As normal obviously I started by trying to put the edge pieces together but even that in itself wasn’t very successful. I tried and tried and I think I still ended up with about 3 pieces I just couldn’t get to fit anywhere and I couldn’t see what if anything I’d done wrong so I started working on the middle instead.

Once complete the puzzle ended up a bit like this.

Next to solve the puzzles within the jigsaw. If you don’t want to see how the challenges are calculated and what the solution is to the escape then please stop reading now.










To find out the answer keep scrolling











We started off with this book as we found around various places on the jigsaw these symbols matching to different letters. This spelled out 3 words: Teiwas, Hagall and Othala. When we found each of these books within the puzzles, each one had a number on the spine and together these made up a 3 digit number which we found on one of the edge pieces of the jigsaw.

The second we attempted was this one - different symbols adding up to make different numbers. If 3 x the first symbol made 90 then each of this symbol must be 30. If 30 + 2 of the same symbol makes 40 then 40-30=10 and 2 of the same number that make 10 will be 5 so the circle symbol must be 5. If 5 + 2 lots of moon symbols is 41 then each set of 2 moon symbols must be 36/2 which is 18. This means that 1 moon must be half of 18 which is 9. Finally the sum at the bottom would therefore be 5+30x9 which is 275.

Another number challenge here on the cushion - this time spotting the pattern and working out the missing figures. Starting at the outside we noticed that each of the numbers on the very outside of the cushion multiples by the one next to it is the figure on the second pink row in on the cushion e.g. 4 x3 is 12, 6x5 is 30. Therefore the missing number in pink must be 8x7 which is 56.
Now to work out the missing number in yellow. This one comes from adding together the two outermost numbers on the outside of the cushion this time e.g. 4+5 is 9, 3+2 is 5. That means the missing one is 8+9 which is 17. That’s 2 more edge pieces found to match the answers to these two challenges.

The next challenge we chose was the clock face with the missing number. Another number one - we like these. This was another multiplication challenge. The numbers at the top, bottom and both sides are equal to the two numbers at either side of them multiplied together e.g. 6x5 is 30, 6x10 is 60, 5x9 is 45. This means that our missing number is 10x9 which is 90. There was also an edge piece of the jigsaw with this number on.

How many is that now - that’s 5 challenges solved and 5 edge pieces found. 3 more challenges to go.

This one was really tricky to find the pattern - my friend who’s more of a maths wizz than I am worked this one out. He worked out that the number of the bottle at the front multiplied by 8 gave the next number along on the bottles at the back of the shelf e.g. 2 (round orange bottle) x 8 is 16 - the next bottle at the back. 11 x 8 is 88. This must mean we are trying to find 83 x 8 which is 664. Wow! That required a lot of brains even to rework it now to write it out!

This is when we started to need a few hints from the internet. We had figured that these bottles must mean something and saw the same 4 colours on these jars in the drawer.

 

So we worked out that the colour of the bottles must mean something but we needed a hint to work out what and also what to do with the shapes. It wasn’t how many sides they have but how many corners. So the hexagon has 6 corners, circle 0, triangle 3 and square 4. The colours of the jars was to tell us what order to put the numbers in so 4936.

That makes all 8 edge pieces that we needed to find.

After a little time playing around with them we got another hint and made up this square with them.

We still needed one final hint to then work out what to do with this now we’d made it up. What we needed to do was to move it around on the rest of the puzzle to find the piece that is shown in the centre that is the exact shape of the gap and shows the antidote to the poison and the escape to this witches cavern.

I really enjoyed doing it and would definitely like to do more - in fact I already have another ordered ready to do. My biggest criticism with the jigsaw itself was that the pieces are really shiny so if you’re trying to work on this in electric light which I was almost all of the time, sometimes a lot of the pieces would reflect and make it difficult to see what was going on. Also the way that you found the answer was really tricky and I don’t think we would have got there without the hints at all. Finally the last thing I’m slightly concerned about is that now I’ve done one then others in the same series may be too similar but I’m not sure if that will be a good thing or not as at least knowing what you are aiming for may help to work it out without the clues but could it make it too same-y. We’ll see. Obviously I’ll let you know. Hope you’re all having a good weekend. I’m having a great one - it’s something really exciting that I’m out doing this weekend. I’ll update you about it next week.