THE LAST DRAGON
ESCAPE GAME
by Melanie Vives &
Remi Prieur
Illustrated by El Gunto
Schiffer Kids
Novelty/Activity
48 pages
ages 8 and up
Your mission: find and recover the dragon egg from the castle before the spatial-temporal portal closes forever! With the help of Dooz, your faithful robot, you have been teleported to the Middle Ages. In this epoch, King Badking rules; he has stolen the last dragon egg and plans to make an omelet out of it for his son . . . In a few minutes, it will be too late. Choose to solve this challenge on your own or with a friend! Either way, let’s go!
Available at Schiffer Publishing here!
or
MY TIDBITS
What a fun game! We grabbed this one up on a Sunday afternoon for a family activity and enjoyed every moment of it.
Anyone who is familiar with the currently popular escape rooms will already have a good feeling for what this book is about. The entire book rotates around one goal: find the dragon egg. There are eight puzzles to solve, and each one is quite different than the others. They range a little bit in difficulty and take slightly different ways of thinking to work through them, which means that a variety of age groups can join in on the fun. We, for example, played it with six people, ranging in ages from twelve to fifty-four.
At first glance, the beginning seemed heavy. There's several pages of hints, explanations, directions and such, which explain how the book works. But it doesn't take long to read through these, and it is nicely done, keeping in line with the game idea and broken down into little cubes...to keep it a bit more entertaining to read. At the end of the book, there are several guides: a hints section and solutions box.
The puzzles do take a bit of thinking but aren't too difficult for players starting up the 4th/5th grade. The guide, a robot named Dooz, is cute and adds a quirky twist to the otherwise castle/fantasy theme. The different rooms invite for fantasy fun and are fun to explore. Each one is packed with bright illustrations that hold the players in the castle world. Also, little boxes of extra information are sprinkled between the pages to help describe certain terms or articles from the castle time period....a little added historical information.
Summed up, this book is a lot of fun. It can be played either alone but is even better with two or more.
And here they are...
The Authors...
Rémi Prieur is a business developer with a long career in social media.
Mélanie Vives is a journalist and cofounder of an independent magazine. She has escaped more than 150 rooms and posts online reviews for France and other countries. Together, they launched escapegame.paris and have collaborated with Benjamin Bouwyn on the bestseller Escape Game, an original book for adults.
The Illustrator...
El Gunto is a French freelance illustrator, currently based in Barcelona, Spain. He has worked on comics and as a concept artist and character designer for the entertainment industry.
