You enter the room and hear the click of the door behind you. On a stone altar of light marble, there are three small statues overlooking 12 cards laid out in neat rows upon the smooth surface. An uncomfortable chair faces the altar. This is what you wanted - an opportunity to be a part of the Order of Ptolemy but can you learn the lesson of the initiation or will you fail in the only attempt you will ever get?
The Order of Ptolemy: The Initiation was originally conceived as an entry in a 9-Card Nanogame contest on BGG and strictly speaking the game/puzzle does fit on 9 cards but the puzzles require larger cards than the contest allowed.
It is presented as extracts from a Wikipedia like biography page of a fictional 12th Century scholar who founded the Order of Ptolemy.
It's an escape room game in the sense that there are a series of puzzles that need to be resolved but has been designed with casual play in mind - the puzzles can be put down and returned to at a later stage very easily. As players start making connections between the different components of the cards the puzzles and the answers should reveal themselves.
There are four sets of puzzles - the first and second set can be solved simultaneously but the third and fourth use some of the answers from the first two in the solution process.
There is a final one word answer.
Inspired in part by some online Riddles, some of the puzzles may require a small amount of Google but logically so.
This is a partially tested version that I would like to turn into a print and play escape room game.
I dont see a way to include the pdf directly so I am adding the images of the cards with a link to the pdf. Its a four pager, each page with 4 cards (low ink but the colour is important)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vONXnwhwL0FOKJ1AuOXpAnB9cvT9LG6L/view?usp=sharing