A puzzle behind every door: locks, secret codes, hiding places around the home. For Christmas, a birthday, the holidays or a whole group.
Free up to 3 doors, no sign-up. The person receiving the calendar needs no app and no account. The builder and the calendars speak English too.
On a laptop? Scan with your phone – then you play the example there, camera and all.
This is a real calendar – tap a door and play.
Who it’s for, how many doors, starting when. Theme, character and inside jokes – or let AI write a story with puzzles and tweak it.
Clue, lock, reward – for each door. Photos, voice recordings, secret codes. Tools like the cipher wheel you print out, the red film you pick up at a craft shop – and then you hide them.
Play through everything once in the preview. Then publish the calendar and give away the link – on the first day, the first door opens.
A character who brings a puzzle every day, and at the end confetti and a surprise – from a birthday weekend to a holiday countdown.
Template: Birthday weekend · 3 doors · freeOne puzzle a day for everyone together – on screen, on the projector or in the group chat. For the class, the team at the office, the club.
Template: Countdown for a group · 10 doors · CHF 5.–24 days full of inside jokes, shared memories and a finale that leads to the present.
Template: Elf Mail · 24 doors · CHF 24.–The text sits in blue beneath dense red scribbles. The noise appears on the phone – nothing to print. Hold a red film (craft shop or a red transparent folder) in front of the screen and the red vanishes, revealing the text. A classic that amazes every time.
A combination lock with wheels. The digits come from earlier doors, from tools carrying a code digit or from a puzzle in the clue. Ideal for the finale.
You print the code (solution sheet) and hide it. Find it, scan it with the phone camera – and the door opens. Found too early? It’s saved and counts on the right day.
You photograph a picture on the wall, a postcard, some packaging; the builder turns it into a recognition target. Point the camera at it and your message appears – and the door opens. Needs internet and camera permission.
You write the plain text, the calendar encrypts it. Caesar and Vigenère go with the cipher wheel, pigpen with the printed key; Morse and binary can be cracked with a bit of searching online.
A memory game with emojis or short words, each card twice. Six pairs are pleasant, ten a real challenge.
Over several doors, the person receiving it collects the words of a sentence, the letters of a solution word or notes. Everything appears in the collection book – and is needed for the finale.
For the finale: a text fades in line by line, the last one large. This is the moment the gift is revealed.
It’s a single file, with all solutions encrypted. No expiry date, no subscription. It will still work in ten years – whatever happens to Escalender.
The person receiving the calendar opens a link. That’s it. Progress stays on their own phone, nothing is reported anywhere.
Free up to three doors, then 50 centimes per door – one franc with hands-on puzzles. Per calendar, one time only. No ads, no account needed to build.
A weekend or an evening: text, picture, answer, combination lock, multiple choice and a finale with confetti. Character, story assistant, three designs (including Advent with a scene). With a small line “Made with Escalender”.
Plus the collection book, secret codes, anagrams, mirror writing, audio recordings and the games: memory, sliding puzzle, put in order, pixel picture. All designs and themes (winter, spring, summer, autumn), your own colour and character, decoy page – without the Escalender line. An Advent calendar with 24 doors costs CHF 12, at most CHF 15.
All puzzles: QR codes to hide, camera on real objects, red film, cipher wheel, stencil – with print templates. An Advent calendar with 24 doors costs CHF 24, at most CHF 30.
Paid calendars cost at least CHF 3.–. You only pay when you publish – building, trying and playing through in the preview is always free. No subscription: the calendar runs forever afterwards, even if you never pay again.
No. The calendar is a web page that runs in the browser on any phone. They get a link, and that’s all. Progress is saved on the phone.
No. The doors are encrypted and only decrypted on the right day – changing the clock on the phone doesn’t help, because the date comes from the server. Even opening the file and looking inside reveals no solutions.
Yes. Start date and number of doors are up to you. And instead of opening by date, the doors can also open one after the other – the next one as soon as the previous one is solved. Then it becomes an escape room for an evening.
Not necessarily. The story assistant asks you for the basics and a few inside jokes and creates a text you give to an AI of your choice. You paste in the answer, the builder checks it and creates the doors. Whatever only you know, you add afterwards.
Only what you use: QR codes to hide, the cipher wheel, the stencil, the pigpen cipher key – all available as print templates in the builder. A calendar can also do without a printer entirely.
Usually not – almost everything happens on the phone, plus a bit of paper at most. Only two puzzle types need something from a shop: for the red film, a red colour film from a craft shop or a red clear plastic sleeve (the test page in the builder lets you check whether the shade works), and for mirror writing, a pocket mirror. What the calendar itself costs is listed under pricing.
With one click: in the builder, click “Publish” – your calendar gets its own address on escalender.ch, which you give away. You can change it at any time under “My calendars”. Here’s how.
A small calendar is free: up to 3 doors with simple puzzles. For example, for a birthday weekend.
For more doors, you pay per door:
An example: an Advent calendar with 24 doors costs 12 francs (Plus) or 24 francs (Adventure).
You pay only once per calendar. There’s no subscription. And you only pay when you publish the calendar.