(Last updated: 02/24/2022)
I’ve spent most (if not all) of my time just staying and chilling at home, which gives me a perfect excuse to do jigsaw puzzles! (*cheering from the bottom of my heart*) I bought this Escape Room Jigsaw Puzzle from Ravensburger on black Friday last year and now is the time to tackle it!
Ravensburger Brand Introduction
Established in Ravensburg, Germany in 1883, Ravensburger is a toy brand that has lasted for more than a hundred years. It has a leading position in the European jigsaw puzzle market. Besides puzzles, Ravensburger also has a wide portfolio of board games and toys.
Escape Room Jigsaw Puzzle Quality and Review
As a puzzleholic, I usually only buy 1,000 piece puzzles (because I’ll want to buy every single puzzle if I don’t set this piece count limitation lol), but I still purchased this 759 piece puzzle (yes, ended up ignoring my own rule right away 🙂 ). The “escape room” jigsaw puzzle idea is just too cool to skip! It’s combining the two elements I love – puzzle solving and jigsaw puzzles. How can I not buy it? Before we get into my review and experience with this puzzle, let’s start with some basic information first.
Basic Information
- Piece count: 759 pieces
- Dimensions of the box: 8.75 x 8.75 x 2.75 inches / 22.2 x 22.2 x 6.99 cm
- Dimensions of the completed puzzle: 27 x 20 inches / 68.58 x 50.80 cm
- Puzzle piece thickness: about 2 mm (love this ♡♡♡♡♡)
This escape room jigsaw series has 6 different themes. The one I bought is Curse of The Wolves*. There are also Space Observatory*, Witches Kitchen*, Submarine*, Vampire’s Castle*, and Forbidden Basement*.
Unboxing Experience
After unboxing, all the pieces are properly cut, no pieces are connected together. But there is quite a bit of puzzle dust. I would say it’s around a medium amount of dust.
Puzzle Pieces
Then here are some close-ups of the pieces! The printing quality in the front is pretty good. The slight matte surface makes it almost anti-glare. But there is still some reflection, making it harder to identify the colors when it comes to the darker area. The back of the pieces is the recognizable Ravensburger blue cardboard.
All I can say is that I truly love this one so much ♡. From the jigsaw puzzle quality to the escape room part of the clues and puzzles, it’s totally my type. The most satisfying part is that feeling when you put down the right puzzle piece! Are you like me, whose favorite part of doing a jigsaw puzzle is the satisfaction it brings when finding the correct puzzle piece and pressing it down? If so, that feeling with the Ravensburger puzzle is so great and I’ll highly recommend it! 2 mm thick puzzle pieces plus the so-called “Softclick” technology make the puzzling experience even more amazing ♡ (chef kiss)
Puzzle pieces are all basic shapes – a square with 4 inward or outward tabs. There are no special pieces but the shapes of each piece are different enough. So it’s easy to know if you get it right when you try to put pieces together, except for the border pieces (we’ll get to that later 😉 ). It’s also quite sturdy. I like to redo the puzzles several times so this is important to me. Puzzles made of paper are certainly not as durable as the plastic ones, but this Ravensburger one looks strong enough to me so far! I’ve done this puzzle twice and zero puzzle pieces are damaged or separated.
The puzzle is also interlocking closely. I was able to move around a small section of pieces once I put them together. They will not split if you move them with a bit of caution. Once you complete the puzzle, you can lift the whole puzzle for a moment if being extra careful with it. But it will definitely need some glue if you plan to hang it on the wall.
Puzzle Image
As for the image of the puzzle, the Curse of The Wolves one I got has some clear sections of colors, so I think it’s around the medium difficulty. But because it is designed to be an escape room puzzle where you need to complete the jigsaw puzzle first to see the clues for the escape room part, the finished image will be a bit different from what is printed on the box. In other words, you can still refer to the image on the box but it won’t be 100% the same. If you don’t like or are not used to doing jigsaw puzzles with no reference picture to rely on, then you might want to consider other series that is not the escape room type.
The escape room part of the puzzle also got me ♡ But I think it is quite hard (or I’m probably just not smart enough lol). I tried solving it for a long while but still have 1 to 2 puzzles unsolved. I’ll talk about how to play this escape room puzzle in the next section 🙂
How Does This “Escape Room” Jigsaw Puzzle Work
Now I’m going to talk about how this escape room puzzle works! The things I talk about here should not affect your experience with the puzzle as I will not type out the clues or answers. But if you want to go fully blind without knowing anything about how to play it, please skip this part.
－－－A small spoil alert－－－
When doing this escape room jigsaw puzzle, there is a small manual included in the box, which will tell you the background story of this puzzle then give you a mission. For example, the Curse of The Wolves has a short story about a curse and asks you to find a way to break it. Then you can start to do the jigsaw puzzle like any other regular ones, look for the clues on the image, and solve those puzzles. For each puzzle, there will be a numerical answer.
Many of the border puzzle pieces also are marked with numbers. Once you have the answers, you can pick out the matching puzzle pieces, and use these border puzzle answer pieces to form a new small jigsaw puzzle image!!! Furthermore, the new small jigsaw puzzle can be placed on the full-sized one and change a part of the bigger image! Because the border pieces will be taken off to form another small puzzle, all border pieces can fit with each other, hence the above-mentioned “issue” about not sure if it’s the right one for the border part. But for this, I think it’s totally worth it!
Conclusion
Respect the one who invented and designed this puzzle! I’ve never thought that the border pieces can be rearranged into another small puzzle, and then fit back into the bigger one! My heart was full of respect and excitement in the final stage of doing this puzzle. Although I sort of guessed what the small image might be like, when I successfully finished the small puzzle with the border pieces and put it in the right spot, I still couldn’t help but feel so touched by the great design… This is such a great puzzling experience!
In summary, I love this Ravensburger escape room jigsaw puzzle very much. Everything’s good from the satisfying thick puzzle pieces to the escape room puzzles. Sincerely recommend you to try their puzzles if you are a jigsaw puzzle lover! The next one on my wishlist is this 1,000 piece Disney Fantasia one below. As a puzzle, Disney, and music lover, this is just hard to resist 🔥 Plus this is part of Ravensburger’s world record large jigsaw puzzle. But this post will be way too long if we continue to talk about it so let me save this for another time 😉
If you like puzzle-solving, this escape room series puzzle is really worth a try! It will be a perfect activity to be amazed by Ravensburger solve the puzzles whether it’s on your own or with a group of people. Anyways, I highly recommend this! (You could probably tell by the fact that I’ve written more than 1,500 words in this post for this puzzle lol).
Lastly, here are the pictures of the completed puzzle. There’s more reflection in the photos but not as much in real life. Don’t scroll down if you’re planning to do this exact same puzzle and want to avoid seeing the final image, as the completed puzzle image will contain the clues and puzzles for the escape room part.
Alright! Thank you so much for reading this long, long post lol. If you have any puzzles that you like, would like to recommend, or want to learn more about, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment so I can have an excuse to buy more puzzles! 😉
－－－Another spoiler alert－－－
… and if you read this post all the way here, congratulations! Here’s a little puzzling timelapse as an easter egg for you! 😀
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