Our Favorite Mystery Box Game Subscriptions of 2025

Escape the Crate: An escape room at home

Difficulty: easy
Ages: early teens and above

Trying to put a whole escape-room experience in a box is a tough proposition, but that’s what Escape the Crate shoots for. This box—$30 if you subscribe on an ongoing basis to receive shipments once every two months—comes with a stack of clues and bits of information printed on a variety of note cards and papers, all with letter labels so that you don’t read a clue before you’re supposed to. This preventive measure wasn’t particularly effective, in my experience; it mostly just led to frequent shuffling and flipping papers around. In addition to the loose papers, the box contains a number of sealed envelopes (filled with more lettered sheets and clues), and the interior of the box itself even has puzzles printed on it.

Setting up this particular box (I played the Prohibition-era case “Murders in the Speakeasy” during my testing) took about 15 minutes. I spent most of that time sorting through the included materials and confirming that I wasn’t missing anything, but Escape the Crate also prompts you to log in to its website before beginning.

The online portal acts as a game manager during the playthrough, prompting the player to input puzzle solutions before advancing through the (at times a bit cheesy) narrative. For each puzzle it also provides a series of hints, progressing from extremely vague to nearly giving you the answer, which is useful when you don’t understand the puzzle mechanics or, in the case of my playthrough, you lose track of one of the double-sided clue sheets that you need for the puzzle to work.

Keeping track of the clues was a struggle for me since each clue sheet has two sides that feature completely different bits of information relevant to different puzzles. As a result, I found myself constantly verifying which lettered sheet I needed to have displayed at any given time. Folks who have done in-person escape rooms will be somewhat familiar with this feeling—it’s like trying to keep track of a dozen keys, knowing eventually you’ll find the matching locks, while also shuffling the keys around to find an answer to a riddle. It’s a bit much.

But all of those materials mean the puzzles are many and varied. Escape the Crate’s boxes do a good job of keeping things engaging when you’re working through a problem, and although they aren’t ever particularly difficult, the puzzles do provide a few “aha!” moments, which I found quite satisfying.

Overall, this box is well suited for families with kids or young adults who are willing to keep track of all the sheets and don’t mind being tethered to the internet for the majority of the game. But those looking for more in-depth puzzle solving or more complex storytelling are likely to be a bit disappointed at the end. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but if you prefer not to subscribe in the first place, you can buy “retired boxes” on a one-off basis for $40 per box.

Society of Curiosities: An immersive puzzler

Difficulty: moderate
Ages: teen to adult

Whereas some of the options we tested focused on piling on puzzles or setting up expansive options for player choice, “Madok’s Lost Treasure” by Society of Curiosities aims for immersion more than anything else.

As with Escape the Crate, a good portion of the experience requires an internet connection. But instead of siloing the player inside a walled internet garden, as those games do, the challenges in this box prompt the player to explore the endless, unmanicured wilds of the internet, which Society of Curiosities has seeded with its own real-seeming yet puzzle-related websites. That discovery process—feeling like you’re in on a secret that’s hiding in plain sight—is where this game shines.

The mystery revolves around a long-lost pirate treasure, a theme that’s reinforced by the package’s aged, stained maps and gold pieces covered in cryptic symbols. It puts the player in charge of a recovery team tasked with retrieving the hoard. In addition to the pirate artifacts, the box contains just two pieces of paper that look as if they were ripped from the pages of a magazine, plus a small envelope marked “Confidential.” It’s a surprisingly small amount of material compared with what you get in other boxes, but that’s because the story mostly unfolds online.

It’s undeniably cool to find secret websites hiding in the public spaces of the internet, as well as to get text messages from a “field team” responding to instructions on where to dig, but the game’s reliance on the internet made getting into it a bit tricky: Once I’d set everything up, I found it difficult to figure out what the game wanted me to do. The game’s hint system helps you clear that initial hurdle, but it feels like a letdown to have to resort to using those hints.

The game’s writing, while perfectly fine in the materials directly related to the puzzles, seems sparse when it isn’t dropping hints or exposition for the player. This disparity makes it a little too obvious where the relevant clues are, which in turn limits the immersion that the game strives to build. If a “family magazine” contains eight paragraphs about pirate flags but only a few sentences on other subjects, it’s easy to figure out what the game wants you to read and thus harder to suspend disbelief.

Even considering those missteps, I thought “Madok’s Lost Treasure” was more immersive than most of the other games I tested, and its focus on building a convincing world makes this $50 box a good option for internet-savvy sleuths.

Finders Seekers: Globe-trotting puzzles

Difficulty: easy
Ages: early teens and above

If you’d prefer your puzzles to revolve around topics like the Dead Sea instead of dead bodies, Finders Seekers is a monthly subscription that themes its boxes around specific locations, often incorporating information from those places into the puzzles. For instance, the box I played while testing featured posters from 10 different US national parks with puzzles on the back of each one, plus factoids about the history or makeup of the park in question.

It’s a nice bonus: When you start out trying to decipher a cryptic collection of letters and end up learning that the island in the middle of Crater Lake is called Wizard Island, it’s a fun surprise, and it lends a lighter tone to the puzzles than you get with other mystery boxes. It’s less murder and danger, more adventure and exploration.

What you get in this box is pretty similar to what you find in Escape the Crate—an abundance of paper materials with a few smaller physical props thrown in. The posters in my box (featuring illustrations of each national park) corresponded to a note from an eccentric billionaire who had planned to leave his fortune to the parks but passed away before he told anyone where he had hidden the cash. I was tasked with solving clues on the note, which corresponded with puzzles on each poster, in order to find the fortune and get it to the Park Service.

The story wasn’t as integral to this box as it was to some others I tested—here, it mostly just served as a loose frame on which to hang the puzzles—but it was engaging enough. The puzzles themselves were fairly linear and didn’t really overlap at all. They were simple to complete; in the few instances when I got stuck, I consulted the note, which provided a list of hints (all printed backward so the only way to read it was by looking at it in a mirror). If all else fails during your puzzle solving, you can turn to an active Facebook group full of other solvers for help.

The Finders Seekers experience is simpler than that of some other boxes I tried, and its cases also take less time to solve. But that’s reflected in the $30-per-box price, one of the lowest I found. And if you subscribe to a monthly delivery schedule, the price gets even lower.