These ten escape room puzzles are free to print, one page each, and they run from introductory to expert. Solve them with a pencil, then check your answer online when you think you have it. You do not need an account, and you do not need to give us an email address to download them.
Download all ten as a single PDF, eleven pages including a cover sheet, or take them one at a time from the lists below.
We make at-home escape room games, and these were built by the same two people who write the puzzles that go in the boxes, under the same rules. Until now they lived only in our online puzzle archive. We wrote them for adults, though the thing that makes any of them hard is the mechanism rather than the content, so a determined younger solver will get through the introductory three quite happily.
How hard are these printable puzzles?
Every puzzle carries a star rating, marked on each one below and on the sheet itself.
One star is a single mechanism, and the puzzle tells you what it wants. Two stars means knowing the type of puzzle does not tell you how it works here. We have named the mechanism on every puzzle below, and on a two-star puzzle that still leaves you the harder half, which is working out what it attaches to. Three and four stars stack mechanisms, so what falls out of the first step becomes the raw material for the next, and the puzzle stops confirming that you are on the right track.
The rule we hold to at every level is that the answer proves itself. When you get it right you know, without checking. That matters more here than it does in our boxed games, because there is nobody in the room holding a solution sheet.
Three printable puzzles to start with
Start here if you have not done this kind of thing before, or if you are handing a puzzle to somebody who has not. Each one is a single mechanism, clearly signposted.
- Jungle Pet (✦, cipher). A special operations team reaches a ransacked island laboratory and has to work out what the missing scientists left behind. Jungle Pet hints and solution.
- Rendezvous (✦, acrostic). A pigeon taps at your window carrying a note. The meeting place is already set, and the timing is what you have to pull out of the poem. Rendezvous hints and solution.
- Defector (✦, anagram). One door stands between you and a rogue scientist's biolab, after three years and thousands of hours of CIA work. Defector hints and solution.
Rendezvous and Defector each need only two hints to get anybody unstuck, which is the clearest signal we can give you that they are the gentle ones.
Five printable puzzles for a group
The five intermediate puzzles are the ones we would put in front of a group, because most of them reward more than one person looking at the same sheet of paper.
- The Guardians (✦✦, knights and knaves logic). Two armored knights hold scrolls. Each scroll holds either only truths or only lies, and working out which one is which comes before the clues are worth anything. The Guardians hints and solution.
- Train Treason (✦✦, wordplay). A KGB agent is somewhere in the crowd coming off a train, and your instincts are not narrowing it down. Train Treason hints and solution.
- Conquest (✦✦, Caesar cipher). A messenger reaches the command tent with a wax tablet, and Caesar has to choose between disbanding his army and crossing the Rubicon. Conquest hints and solution.
- Bird Brain (✦✦, pattern recognition). Your colleague Norman is convinced his crows are talking to him. They stand upright or bend over, they face left or right, and they fall into four groups. Bird Brain hints and solution.
- Museum Mischief (✦✦, letter indexing). Four postcards carry nothing but innocuous travel scribble, and one of them tells you where an international museum thief will turn up next. Museum Mischief hints and solution.
Conquest is the one to hand to somebody who says they are bad at puzzles. A Caesar cipher is the most forgiving mechanism there is, because a wrong shift produces obvious nonsense and the right one produces obvious English. You cannot talk yourself into a wrong answer, so the puzzle does the reassuring for you.
Two printable logic puzzles for experienced solvers
One advanced and one expert, and both stack mechanisms. Give them a table and a clear evening rather than a spare ten minutes.
- Bombs Away (✦✦✦, multi-cipher). You have ten minutes. The device in front of you carries a transponder suggesting more of them are hidden inside a nearby opera house, and encrypted texts keep arriving on your phone. Bombs Away hints and solution.
- A Cooking Quandary (✦✦✦✦, logic scheduling). It is almost noon on Thanksgiving, dinner is at five, and you were supposed to be helping Aunt Edna and Uncle Earl hours ago. A Cooking Quandary hints and solution.
A Cooking Quandary is the hardest thing in the archive and the numbers are why. Six dishes, four of which need the oven, and the oven takes one dish at a time. Add up the oven time and it comes to four and a half hours inside a five hour window, so there are thirty spare minutes in the entire afternoon and every decision has to be made around them. Then, once you have the order right, the order itself becomes the input to a second puzzle.
Why the answers are not printed on the page
Each sheet sends you back to our site to check, and we did that on purpose.
An answer key printed at the bottom of the page is permanently one glance away. Nobody decides to cheat, they just look, because looking costs nothing and thinking costs something. Keeping the solution a click away means a group that gets stuck can take one hint rather than seeing the whole answer at once, and gets to keep the part of the puzzle it had not finished yet.
So every puzzle has a hint ladder that stops short of the answer until you ask. The hint count tracks something else: the number of distinct places a solver can stall. Rendezvous needs two because there are only two. A Cooking Quandary needs eight because it is really a chain of eight decisions and you can come off the rails at any of them. Bombs Away is harder than The Guardians and still needs fewer hints, because its difficulty sits in one place rather than spread across the page.
Past the last hint there is a written solution if you want to stop. Type the right answer into the box instead and you get the end of the story along with a note on how the mechanic actually works, which is usually the part people wanted.
How we make and test our escape room puzzles
Every puzzle we sell goes out to more than a dozen testers, picked because they think in different ways. Most come back needing a few tweaks and we treat that as the normal outcome rather than a bad sign. Some need a major revamp. Every so often one turns out to be beyond saving and gets built again from scratch.
We are testing for two specific failures: a puzzle that can be solved by accident, and one where a solver arrives at the right answer without ever being sure it is right. Both feel identical to the person writing the puzzle and completely different to the person solving it, and the only way to find them is to watch somebody else try. If you want the longer version of that argument, what makes a good escape room puzzle sets out the rules we design by, and the eight families of escape room puzzle sorts the mechanisms you have just been solving.
What to do with them
The obvious use is one puzzle, one person, and a quiet twenty minutes. Two less obvious ones are worth trying.
Hand one to a table of people who have not met
Print four copies of one intermediate puzzle and give a copy to each small group. It gets strangers talking faster than an icebreaker does, because there is something on the table to point at and nobody has to be interesting on demand. It also works on a long car trip, where a pencil is the only equipment, which is more than can be said for most things that hold a teenager's attention.
Use them to work out whether a boxed game is for you
If you are curious about at-home escape room games and cannot tell whether your group would enjoy one, print Conquest and Museum Mischief and watch what happens. A group that argues cheerfully for half an hour will like a box. A group that goes quiet and reaches for a phone will not, and that is worth knowing for the price of two sheets of paper.
If it goes well, see how The Fifth Column works. It is the one most people start with: Manhattan in June 1945, pulling apart a Nazi plot that did not stop when Germany surrendered. 1 to 6 players, 2 to 4+ hours across two parts, ages 14+, 4.9 stars from 151 reviews. Nothing in the box needs cutting or writing on, so it survives being played and can be passed on to somebody else afterwards. If a 1945 thriller is not your thing, the rest of our at-home escape room games include a Victorian detective case and a trip through Wonderland.
Common questions
Are these really free?
Yes. You click the link and the PDF downloads, with no form in the way. The hints and solutions are open on our site as well.
What do I need to print them?
Any printer and ordinary paper. Each puzzle is a single US Letter page. Most print fine in black and white, though a few read better in color because the artwork carries part of the puzzle.
How long does one take?
We have never put a stopwatch on them, so any number we gave you would be invented. What we can tell you is what governs it: the star rating, and whether you have met the mechanism before. Somebody who has solved a cipher will finish Jungle Pet in a few minutes and somebody who has not may sit with it for half an hour, and both of those are the puzzle working properly.
Are these suitable for kids?
The mechanics are the real gate rather than the content. There is nothing graphic in any of them, though the settings are spy and wartime flavored, so a bomb and a biolab turn up. The introductory three suit a motivated solver of about ten and up. A Cooking Quandary defeats plenty of adults. Our boxed games are a different matter and are rated 14+.
Can I use these in a classroom or at a work event?
Please do, and print as many copies as you need. We only ask that you leave the page as it is rather than stripping our name off it, and that you point people at the site rather than handing out the solutions yourself.
Are there more than ten?
There are fifteen in our free online puzzle archive, where you solve them in the browser with the same hints and answer checker. We made printable versions of the ten whose artwork was drawn at a size that survives a printer. The other five would come out too soft to solve fairly, and squinting is not a puzzle mechanic.