Christmas heist escape rooms and puzzle books

MysteryLocks sells a print-and-play PDF. The Aurora Crystal is stolen on a Christmas train; every passenger is a suspect; you solve seven puzzles in about 60 minutes at medium difficulty before the station. You print, cut, and check answers with an optional four-digit lock or envelopes. George-Gabriel Staicu is the maker. A personal licence is $20. The product page adds a non-profit uplift, a business uplift and a for-profit uplift on top of that base. The shop shows 92 reviews on the product and a store-wide pattern of mostly five-star reviews. Escape the Review has a separate entry dated 4 December 2024 and does not add a player score. This is a PDF, not a room you book.

SOLV’s book is 104 pages, dated 25 August 2023, ISBN 9782958807221. Twenty-four puzzles, a phone for scanning codes, an on-demand clue system, and a claim of more than ten hours. On Goodreads the star split I copied was 16 fives, 18 fours, 18 threes, 4 twos and 4 ones. Readers mention uneven difficulty, a softer ending, and at least one puzzle that sends you to a search engine. I am not printing an “8+” age, because the publisher does not.

A separate Amazon listing uses the title The Christmas Spirit Heist. Its product page was not accessible during the 13 November 2026 review, so no current price, stock status, score, publication date or quality recommendation is supplied. Compare the publisher and ISBN carefully before treating similarly named books as interchangeable.