Tag Archives: Massachusetts

Club Drosselmeyer Returns This December (Plus Other Puzzle Events!)

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(I know it’s Halloween season, but it’s never too early to look forward to holiday puzzly goodness for later in the year!)

If you’re a puzzle fan, you’re absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to puzzly events to explore. Crossword tournaments, treasure hunts, escape rooms, puzzles by mail, puzzles by email, puzzles on your phone.

But I guarantee you’ve never experienced anything like Club Drosselmeyer.

Imagine getting all gussied up in your best 1940s-appropriate garb and grabbing your tickets before heading out to a show in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What kind of show, you ask? Well, a vaudeville-style variety show with live music, enchanting and exciting performances, and all sorts of mysteries and intrigue playing out before your eyes, all set during the heady days and nights of World War II.

And what if there was an elaborate puzzle hunt tying the entire show together?

In a nutshell, that’s a Club Drosselmeyer event.

And tickets are available this Thursday for their latest immersive show!

There are performances set for December 4th, 5th, & 6th AND December 10th, 11th, 12th, & 13th for a two-hour whirlwind of puzzly theatricality. As the organizers themselves say, “Prepare yourself for another season of magic and mayhem, romance and revelry, champagne and sugarplums.”

Although I’ve never gotten to attend a Club Drosselmeyer event in person, a few years ago I participated in their virtual Club Drosselmeyer Interactive Radio Broadcast of 1943, and it remains one of my all-time favorite puzzle experiences.

I enjoyed two hours of wonderful music while tracking a rogue flying toaster, unraveling a criminal conspiracy during an air raid, decoding secret messages, helping a starlet choose the right lipstick for her show, and even performing a magic trick!

Club Drosselmeyer is run by a small and incredibly dedicated group of writers, performers, puzzlers, and musicians who put their all into this event every single year, and I simply cannot sing their praises loud enough.

But if you can’t wait for December…

Our friends at Club Drosselmeyer have cordially invited you to a wedding!

Back in April, I helped spread the word about The Wedding Party, an interactive puzzle experience that ran in Boston through the summer.

And it’s been extended (again)! The Wedding Party will be running in October and November as well!

That’s so many new opportunities to check out this delightful “playable theater” experience.

It seems our good friends, Jack and Norah, are finally getting married. You know Jack and Norah, right? Of course you do, EVERYBODY knows Jack and Norah! They both work at Harmonics Inc. (Not the game studio, the global telecom services company founded by the Lane family. Right, that one.) Their reception will be at the W Boston Hotel downtown. They’re thrilled that you’re coming and we’re absolutely certain it will be an entirely normal wedding with absolutely no surprises at all.

…

The Wedding Party will have all of the Drossely craziness that you love but set in 2026 — and with dinner! This wedding will have it all: wonderful food, champagne and custom cocktails, decorations, a charming bridal party, spies, puzzles, intrigue… all the best things of a totally regular normal-person wedding.

Who doesn’t love a wedding with all the pomp and circumstance and spies and secret plots and potentially world-endangering threats?

You know, wedding stuff!

Nope, we’re STILL not done with puzzly Drosselmeyer promotions!

Blood Hunt is a comedy vampire bar crawl on Halloween night in Malden, Massachusetts! It’s What We Do in the Shadows with a puzzle hunt twist, loaded with fun characters, good drinks, and silly, spooky fun.

Check out the pitch:

You are newly turned. Freshly fanged. Tragically immortal. And before dawn, you must pass trials administered by the most unhinged elders the undead world has to offer. You and your coterie have until dawn to prove yourself worthy of the ancient vampire council — four locations, each with trials and elders who have survived plagues and empires and are somehow most annoyed by you specifically.

Can you endure all four stops and prove your vampiric value?

Click here for tickets and more details on the event!

Will you be attending any of these delightful immersive puzzly experiences, fellow solvers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Club Drosselmeyer Invites You to a Wedding!

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There are all sorts of immersive puzzly experiences available these days. Crossword tournaments, treasure hunts, escape rooms, puzzles by mail, puzzles by email, puzzles on your phone…

But nothing mixes music, art, showmanship, and puzzles quite like a Club Drosselmeyer event.

Although they’re best known for their holiday puzzle events set in the early 1940s during World War II, they’ve recently begun branching out with other themes. Last year, they hosted a Cthulhu-inspired luau event.

And this year, they’ve invited us all to the wedding of Jack and Norah:

It seems our good friends, Jack and Norah, are finally getting married. You know Jack and Norah, right? Of course you do, EVERYBODY knows Jack and Norah! They both work at Harmonics Inc. (Not the game studio, the global telecom services company founded by the Lane family. Right, that one.) Their reception will be at the W Boston Hotel downtown. They’re thrilled that you’re coming and we’re absolutely certain it will be an entirely normal wedding with absolutely no surprises at all.

…

The Wedding Party will have all of the Drossely, Luau-ey craziness that you love but set in 2026 — and with dinner! This wedding will have it all: wonderful food, champagne and custom cocktails, decorations, a charming bridal party, spies, puzzles, intrigue… all the best things of a totally regular normal-person wedding.

Unlike traditional Drosselmeyer shows, which are often limited to a few select weekends, The Wedding Party will run from May 1st through June 14th! You’ll have tons of chances to nab tickets for a singularly lovely puzzly event. And you can play with a group of up to six people.

It will be hosted at the W Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts in collaboration with Toronto’s Secret City Productions, and you can click here for tickets and all the details!

I cannot say enough good things about the Club Drosselmeyer team. They’re not just great puzzle designers, they put so much into the aesthetics of the event, adding music and performances and a thousand little trappings that bring their fictional world to life for guests.

A few years ago I participated in their virtual Club Drosselmeyer Interactive Radio Broadcast of 1943, and it remains one of my all-time favorite puzzle experiences.

I have no doubt The Wedding Party will be another success for this amazing team. Give them a chance, you won’t be disappointed.

Amazing Maize Mazes!

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It’s October! October means falling leaves, Halloween delights, and a particular brand of puzzle that can only be enjoyed outdoors: the corn maze.

The corn maze is a seasonal hall of mirrors, a mental challenge that envelops you like few puzzles ever will.

Whether it’s a simple series of twists and turns designed for kids, or an elaborate design for adults whose true complexity can only be appreciated from above, corn mazes are a terrific puzzly experience for the whole family, and October is prime corn maze season.

Friend of the blog Cathy Quinn passed along an article from the Boston Globe featuring bits of trivia on numerous New England corn mazes, covering such curiosities as the machetes wielded by the Hanson’s Farm crew and the precautions taken by Marini Farm’s maze masters, including phone number to call and GPS assistance available for lost maze-goers.

But for someone looking for a puzzle with a bit more bite, worry not! Some truly devious corn maze designers cook up extra challenges for the brave of heart and sharp of wit.

[Do you see a dinosaur?]

The corn maze found at Pennsylvania’s Cherry Crest Farm, for instance, has three levels of difficulty, each demanding more puzzle skill and problem-solving acumen than the one before.

Their easy version is a basic run-through the maze (indicated with yellow trail markers), while their intermediate one features orange clues to unravel that guide you through a more complicated path. And their most difficult run? Well, that one requires you to collect every piece of a scattered map and every Kernel of Knowledge along way, tackling the mental obstacles that accompany every red clue.

Some clued corn mazes feature additional prizes or access to exclusive parts of the maze. (The Billingsgate Farm corn maze in Plympton, Massachusetts, features a pirate theme, and only the most intrepid solvers and explorers will find their way to the treasure chest at the center of the maze.)

It’s been a while since I’ve found myself tackling a corn maze, so I don’t have any anecdotes to add, but Cathy shared a terrific tidbit about the corn maze at Flint Farm she and her family frequent every year:

The article doesn’t mention it, but when you go in, they hand you a list of 10 trivia questions. As you wander the maze, you can come across up to 20 signs giving possible answers, so you have to figure out which answers are correct.

If you get them all right, you are entered into a raffle for free ice cream at their farm stand/ice cream stand. (We never get them all right, alas.)

Are there any great corn mazes near you, fellow puzzlers? Let me know! Share pictures! I’d love to see them!

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