Finalist (2023)

#94 - Top Rooms (2022)

#3 - Best Game - Île-de-France (2022)

#48 - Top Rooms (2021)

Finalist (2020)

For many years, Pandore & Associés has been responsible for guarding the World of Tales. But the latter is more fragile than it looks.

Pandora is looking for new LXR agents to maintain this enchanted universe. You are recruited there for a simple maintenance operation. But what if this small breakdown actually hid a major threat to the Story World?

Pandore & Associés

Règlement de Contes [Fairy Tale Regulations]

Escape room

Fairy Tale Regulations is an incredible game with a very generous use of space, wonderful sets and an original story concept. It is firmly in my top 3 escape rooms so far and has the potential to be #1.

You take the role of a Fairy Tale Regulator: a person responsible for Fairy Tales keeping their natural course: for example, Rapunzel keeping her hair, Aladdin getting his lamp or Rumpelstiltskin not leaking his name online.

This theme is played through a series of tasks, each with its own dedicated room. The gamespace is huge with 6 sets totaling 120 m2 of beautifully decorated play area. The setpieces succeed as follows: 
1. Intro
2. Ali Baba
3. Hansel and Gretel
4. Snow White
5. The Little Mermaid
6. Ending
Each room features only a handful of puzzles, quality over quantity being the name of the game. What is also remarkable is that the difficulty curve of the different rooms increases gradually from Ali Baba to the Ocean World.

The Intro is set in a sort of Fairy Tale item factory where you have to manufacture a series of items for certain heroes or villains. It is meant to set the theme and succeeds brilliantly.

Ali Baba's world is first and has a total of two straightforward puzzles in order to fix the codeword of the cave (this required some outside knowledge, good thing Ana remembered her One Thousand and One Nights✨). The room is mesmerizing, vertical and the upper floor of the cave is perfumed with incense (this is the first escape room we play that uses scents!)

In Hansel and Gretel we were greeted by the witch(played by our GM) who became the story's villain after locking us into her house and stealing our tablet! Fortunately, Ana took the role of Gretel (the cerebral half of the duo) and solved most of the puzzles to free us, while I, as Hansel, was confused about what a macaron looks like 🍩🤔. We baked a warm muffin that acted as the key to our tablet.

In Snow White, the puzzles start getting more deductive and difficult. We had to fix the queen's talking mirror. It is a good puzzle room except we were left a critical note in French instead of English which made us overly dependent on the GM's help. The queen's selfies in her quarters were a funny touch. We also later found out this room was made more difficult recently and as a consequence, the time limit would soon be increased to 85 minutes.

The mirror told us the witch is planning to use the Spellotron in OceanWorld, so our last destination was Ariel's seabed. This is another beautiful room that actually looks like a seabed... except for the keypad that you have to find the code for, which is a little immersion breaking. But getting the code itself was quite cool. The darkness slowed us down here. Because of my bat vision I misread some text 👓 and wasted some time, and the Sunshine Piglet was naturally averse to exploring the pitch black crawlspace of the shipwreck.. but with a few nudges from our GM we managed to solve it.

The ending section is disabling the Spellotron, and it was a bit underwhelming unfortunately. It involves searching for labels on the walls very similar to what we played just the day before at Revolt a la Lock. It didn't work for me there and it definitely didn't work for me here as an outro to such a beautiful escape room.

Here are a few suggestions on how to improve this:

1. The intro is great but it starts too abruptly! Perhaps use the first task (Snow White's poisoned apple) as a tutorial and take players through preparing it step by step. And definitely don't interrupt this tutorial with a 30 second countdown for finding a random button!

2. Make sure all the required material is also in English. Papers with both English and French text would be great here so that these mistakes can't happen. Put English subtitles on the outro video. Not being able to understand the ending compounds the underwhelming feeling.

3. Have a more immersive barrier than a keypad for Ocean World.

4. Rethink the final section to be a more climactic finale. A final confrontation with the witch would be in order, so that she actually fulfills the role of the story's villain. I could imagine a scenario where the players have to fire up an oven to cook the witch 🔥 while she shouts insults (and the occasional hint 😉) from a vantage point. This would be appropriately thematic: the Regulators' initial job was to fix the witch's oven, and in order to further preserve the fairy tale, they must throw the witch in the oven, which doubles as the players' revenge.

The few shortcomings did not sour the experience for us. It was still a beautiful game to play, but this escape room really has the potential to be one of the best in the world!

A unique theme that was well executed and had staff that really embraced it. Easily playable in English

What a fun room!  Our GM did a great job creating an immersive story, and the sets (different theme for each room) were outstanding.  I didn't think that the second half flowed incredibly well, and I was disappointed that we left feeling like we could've performed better. I fully understand why it's on the TERPECA list though, and I love a light-hearted theme.

This is my new favorite room of all time (out of 85). Loved it from start to finish. It flowed well. The puzzles were spectacular. The theming was fantastic. The GM was warm and welcoming. Start to finish this was a superb experience.

Règlement de Contes [Fairy Tale Regulations]

Pandore & Associés

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Règlement de Contes [Fairy Tale Regulations]

Awards

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BravePiglet

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paheidil

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Escape Roomers DE

Escape Roomers DE

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