It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about designing a bookish escape room:

If you designed a book-themed escape room, what puzzles would be part of it?

I have no idea about anything specific, but I’d steer away from using details of specific books in order to appeal to a range of bookworms, using mostly general knowledge. There might be some puns on the names of authors and titles of books, for example, but they’d be guessable by people with a general knowledge of literature.

I imagine there could be something with organising books, possibly with a clue to how they should be organised (I think alphabetical by author is usually the sensible way, but I know other bookworms prefer to make rainbows, sort by book title, or sort by height)… perhaps to open a secret panel or something like that.

If I were to design something specific, it’d be an escape room based on some kind of vintage mystery, and I’d definitely put some decipherment in — if possible, based on a Playfair cypher, as a reference to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase. I don’t think those need to be too difficult, if you left some way to decipher the key word in the room, and I know I’ve written notes to my wife in Playfair cypher once or twice, and they did get deciphered!

I’m not really very good at coming up with stuff like this, though, so generally I’ll leave it to the enthusiasts!