The Enigma Emporium Delivers Puzzles That Melt Your Mind
What if there were a set of puzzles that forced you to do online research, use multiple ciphers, and referenced everything from modern authors to ancient history? What if this was all just one section of one of the puzzles? Well, The Enigma Emporium has all this in some pretty amazing packages. Their main set of puzzles come in the form of postcards. A person or group will open an envelope and it’ll have a couple of postcards. There is a story found throughout the postcards and multiple puzzles on each one too. It is pretty incredible and can be extremely difficult to solve each of them and then make sense of their connections between the postcards. The second form of a puzzle they currently have comes in a deck of cards, which has its own story and a puzzle on each card.
To give some context, my wife and I enjoy Escape Rooms, puzzle video games, Exit: The Game packages, and more. We’re not pros, but we do puzzles often and enjoy them a lot. When we opened up one of the sets of postcards, we spent an hour or two on ONE postcard and we still couldn’t get parts of it without hints online. They are hard. VERY HARD. The difficulty isn’t inherently bad, but part of the puzzle was just figuring out what to do or what was a part of the puzzle and what was just design. After completing a few of them, patterns began to appear and we could discern much easier what were clues and what weren’t. It isn’t impossible, but this is easily the most difficult set of puzzles I’ve worked with in any capacity.
The deck of cards known as Carte Rouge is just as difficult, if not more so. But it is ultimately a good thing, for those who like puzzles, there are few things more satisfying than solving a challenging puzzle. Carte Rouge is beautiful, each card is unique because of the puzzle printed on it, but it also functions fine as a normal deck of cards. It is pretty impressive to see so much complex content squeezed onto a 52 card deck and cool to have such a prestigious and mysterious deck of cards.
If you want a challenge, this is where you’ll want to go. They may be complex and need legitimate online research, but it gives the puzzles life and a strong sense of mystery. Their website is also really great, it offers hints and clues to guide people to the answers while never spelling things out entirely. Check out their two postcard sets, Predator or Prey and Cycle of Learning, and Carte Rouge here. The Enigma Emporium is also working on a new set of puzzles with a comedic twist called Funny Pages: A Comical Puzzle Game, check out more here.