Put Them Through the Maze: The Secrets of How to Write the Ultimate Novel

Symbol substitution is generally a simple task of comparing provided symbols to a key and matching them up to the letters or numbers they correspond to. While a fairly easy puzzle to solve, something like this at the beginning of a game can give players an early win and the confidence and motivation to tackle more difficult puzzles later. To make a symbol substitution puzzle more challenging, you can place the symbols in one room and the key in another, thus requiring players in separate rooms to work together to solve it. Providing objects that look like set decoration but that can be manipulated in unusual ways to accomplish goals is a great way to challenge players to think outside of the box.

If players need a hint on how to use something, you can incorporate the hint into part of another escape room puzzle. Provide a plastic card that players can slide between a door jam and a latch to open a locked door or a door with no handle. Require players to use a heavy object in the room to apply weight to a platform or a switch.

Hide a magnet inside an object, such as an eraser, that can be used to lift a key out of a floor crack or operate a magnet-activated switch. Depending on your theme, you may have paintings, diagrams, photographs, posters, and other decorations on the walls or in frames on shelves or desks around the room.

Require players to recognize a famous person and use that information elsewhere in the game. Many rooms include objects that obviously or perhaps not so obviously go together and require players to combine them to either create a new object or to activate a switch. Give players a jigsaw puzzle to assemble. Include one extra piece, which can be used as a clue or a tool elsewhere in the room. There is some debate among escape room operators regarding the use of algebra and mathematics as opposed to counting or simple calculation in escape games.

Some feel that escape game players expect challenges they may not be prepared for and understand that they can request hints if they get stumped.

Others believe that all the knowledge required to solve the puzzles in a room should be either extremely basic or specifically provided in a prop or another puzzle. A solution that may satisfy both sides of the debate would be to include mathematical puzzles but also provide alternative ways to solve them such as a mathematics book on a bookshelf containing the answer if players lack the skills to solve them on their own. Provide an algebraic formula and require players to calculate the answer. According to the German gestalt theory, our brains naturally create patterns from or connections between stimuli in our surroundings.

Give players a set of symbols that can be combined to create a word or a number. Attach items to a wire board and require players to connect those that create a pattern.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Riddles have been challenging minds for thousands of years. They typically require players to consider alternate meanings of words or to make leaps in logic. In ancient Greece, the ability to solve riddles was considered a sign of keen intelligence. In fact, Greek mythology brought us the famous story of the Sphinx, who allowed entry to Thebes only to those who could answer her riddle. Make the answer to a riddle a clue that players need to complete a task. Unlike the symbol substitution with a key discussed earlier, this type of puzzle requires critical thinking and logic rather than matching.

Let players re-create a cipher key from some known information and apply the key to an encrypted code. If you choose to use ciphers in your rooms without providing a key, make sure you provide players enough information to recognize that they need to develop the key themselves.

Using sound as a puzzle element can be an interesting way to mix things up a little and give players some diversity. Play a sequence of sounds animal sounds, rhythms, tones and require recognition of the sequence to solve another puzzle. Use a well-known music track to provide a clue that involves the band name, the song name, or something related to the song. For example, a Beach Boys song could represent the need to use a shell or a bottle of sand for some purpose.

Play parts of the same message in different rooms so that teammates have to spread out and listen simultaneously to get the full message. Play a loud distracting sound to indicate that a player has pushed the wrong button or flipped the wrong switch. Record clues on cassette tapes and provide a tape player to listen to them. Transmit clues or messages over a radio; require players to find the batteries and the right frequency.

1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part one)

Write a hidden message on a mirror that is only revealed if a player breathes on it. Here are instructions for writing hidden messages on mirrors. You can also create tricky visual illusions when incorporating mirrors into the puzzles themselves. Hide clues in finished Sudoku or similar puzzles.

The Maze Runner - Wikipedia

Make the answer to an IQ test question the secret to solving another puzzle. Providing reference materials hard copies or via digital interface can open up numerous possibilities, since they allow you to design puzzles that require outside knowledge to solve. For those players who know the answers, such puzzles can be solved more quickly, but for everyone else, the opportunity is still available to quickly find the answer and move forward.

Include an almanac of facts among the books on a bookcase that contains a crucial but obscure fact, number, year or other piece of trivia. If players have access to the Internet, create a dedicated website based on your theme containing a clue or message in its images or text. Provide access to an encyclopedia or the Internet as a backup for finding solutions to trivia, math, or other puzzles most people but not all are familiar with.

While some might argue that escape games require strategic thinking throughout, this category refers specifically to puzzles that require players to think ahead and predict outcomes. Create a sequence of puzzles that must be solved in the correct order to reach a desired outcome. Require players to hit the bullseye on an electronic dart board from a distance. Give players a water gun and reveal a message or clue if they can hit a target with a steady stream of water. Depending on your theme, there may be a great opportunity to use ropes or chains as props.

Tie something up and make the knot difficult to untie; for an extra challenge, require the use of another tool found elsewhere in the room to release the knot. Chain players to each other or to something in the room at the beginning of the game and challenge them to get free. Word puzzles, like algebra and mathematics puzzles, often require outside knowledge that some players may not possess. Here is an online crossword puzzle maker.

Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

Mazes can come in all shapes and sizes. You can build a life-sized maze for players to navigate or give them smaller mazes to complete using hand-eye coordination and teamwork. Place a key in a covered maze and require players to use a magnet to move it through the maze to an opening where it can be retrieved. Give players a map that reveals the exact path through a maze and hide a code in the path pattern. One of the best ways to immerse players in your fictional world is to create physical obstacles they must overcome, especially if your theme involves horror, science fiction, or heist elements.

Not all players are physically able to perform tasks that require crawling, climbing, or navigating obstacles. Make sure you specify the level of physical activity required in your room description, so customers can plan appropriately. Consider providing access via a trapdoor set into the floor. And with social media, kids are much more aware of it," says Dashner. So I think [readers of the genre] love relating to the fact that our world could go that way, and that someone their age could make a difference in that world. We reread 'Lord of the Flies,' and it's way more sinister than you remember.

Dashner sat down with MashReads recently in anticipation of the movie adaptation of The Death Cure , the third and final book in Dashner's popular Maze Runner trilogy. The series follows a group of kids stuck in a maze who are trying solve the labyrinth's mysteries.

However, they soon find out that the maze they're in is only one small part of a much larger conspiracy, one that could determine not only their own lives, but also the fate of the world itself. Ever since then mazes have fascinated me, and scared me a little bit. It stuck with me. The whole intrigue and mystery of that show.

I tried to replicate that. As you are building this world post-apocalyptic world [as an author], how do you figure out the boundaries? Also present are ray guns, aerial travel and ESP.

Ironically, the hero finds utopia too boring. He is rescued from death by the Princess Zee, who flies him to safety.

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The novel ends with the ominous prophecy that the superior race will invade the upper earth - "the Darwinian proposition", as Bulwer-Lytton called it. John Sutherland Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. One of a flurry of novels written by Burgess when he was under the mistaken belief that he had only a short time to live. Set in a dystopian socialist welfare state of the future, the novel fantasises a world without religion.

Alex is a "droog" - a juvenile delinquent who lives for sex, violence and subcult high fashion. The narrative takes the form of a memoir, in Alex's distinctive gang-slang. The state "programmes" Alex into virtue; later deprogrammed, he discovers what good and evil really are. The novel, internationally popularised by Stanley Kubrick's film into what Burgess called "Clockwork Marmalade", is Burgess's tribute to his cradle Catholicism and, as a writer, to James Joyce. JS Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

In one of the first split-screen narratives, Burgess juxtaposes three key 20th-century themes: Trotsky's visit to New York is presented as a Broadway musical; a mournful Freud looks back on his life as he prepares to flee the Nazis; and in the year , as a rogue asteroid barrels towards the Earth, humanity argues over who will survive and what kind of society they will take to the stars.

JJ Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom. There, surrounded by four-armed, green-skinned warriors, ferocious white apes, eight-legged horse-substitutes, legged "dogs", and so on, he falls in love with Princess Dejah Thoris, who might almost be human if she didn't lay eggs. She is, naturally, both beautiful and extremely scantily clad Burroughs's first novel, published in serial form, is the purest pulp, and its lack of pretension is its greatest charm.

Disjointed, hallucinatory cut-ups form a collage of, as Burroughs explained of the title, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". A junkie's picaresque adventures in both the real world and the fantastical "Interzone", this is satire using the most savage of distorting mirrors: Only Cronenberg could have filmed it in , and even he recreated Burroughs's biography rather than his interior world.

Butler's fourth novel throws African American Dana Franklin back in time to the early s, where she is pitched into the reality of slavery and the individual struggle to survive its horrors. Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery. Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. A brilliant work on many levels, it ingeniously uses the device of time travel to explore the iniquity of slavery through Dana's modern sensibilities.

The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period's arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler. Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon say it backwards , an upside-down world in which crime is "cured" and illness "punished", where universities are institutions of "Unreason" and technology is banned. The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun ie "Mrs Grundy" - bourgeois morality. Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there.

He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops. Drafted soon after Calvino's break with communism over the invasion of Hungary, the novel can be read as a fable about intellectual commitments. At the same time, it's a perfectly turned fantasy, densely imagined but lightly written in a style modelled on Voltaire and Robert Louis Stevenson. Chris Tayler Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows. In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies - a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan.

A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation. Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch. She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented.

Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound.

The 39 Clues Series

The trippier sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, like its predecessor, illustrated by John Tenniel. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams. The year is - and other times.

Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures.

The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet. Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil.

Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies. XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light.

Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet. Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman.

At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god. Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century.

Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.

It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant. This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows. Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped.

This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds? It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep.

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It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves. It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel.