Hello, fellow mystery seeker, and thanks for your curiosity about our soon-to-be escape room venture. My goal with this newsletter is to tell you all about the exciting things happening at Riddlehaven without spoiling any surprises. Light your lantern and step across the threshold—you're officially in the know!

Location Updates

Finding commercial space in Dover has been an adventure. We've been on the hunt since March 2024, searching for a space that is at least 2,500 sq. ft., that's accessible, and is ideally already divided into multiple rooms (meaning less wall-building for us!).

But good news: we’ve found a promising option within walking distance of downtown that checks all of our boxes. We’re working out the details, so stay tuned for more updates!

Sneak Peek: The Ghost Ship

We are deep in the creative trenches finalizing the game flow for The Ghost Ship. Crafting immersive stories is what gets our hearts racing—it’s why we’re doing this—but it’s far from easy and we have some steep learning curves to climb.

We are working on a short video introduction to the game that will use animated illustrations to tell part of the mysterious story of the clipper ships Flora and Fauna. Shout out to my friends at Testwood Creative Studio who are helping us with video production.

An illustration of a shipwreck — The abandoned and wrecked ship *Fauna*.

A venus fly trap sculpted from clay — Lastly, we are diving into prop-making for the room. I don’t want to give away too many specifics about the game, but I can’t resist showing you our first completed creation, built by Will. I think she needs a name, no?

We have a logo!

After many, many (so many) design variations and revisions and much gnashing of teeth, we have a Riddlehaven logo.

I’m a graphic designer and font connoisseur and have been known to become possessed when working on a logo project, which was absolutely the case with this one. My goal was to design something that was mysterious but also whimsical, and contained a symbol like a key, padlock, or door—something that would help identify Riddlehaven as an escape room.

I think the symbol of a glowing lantern with a doorway in it hits the mark, and I hope you like it as much as I do. I love lanterns and mood lighting in general, so expect to see lots of moody lanterns in our space.

We will have merch available on the site soon if you are brave enough to emblazon yourself with a logo from a business that isn’t even open yet!

Thank you so much for joining us on this new adventure. Until next time!

Kim

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Mad Props