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Welcome to Puzzling Ventures, a blog dedicated to the Usborne Puzzle Adventure series, and its various spinoffs. These beloved children’s books mixed storytelling with puzzles every few pages, mixed naturally into the narrative. In fact, despite being ink and paper, I find that Usborne’s puzzles were much better incorporated than in other mediums like tabletop RPGs or video games! Well… most of the time.
We’ll be taking a look at every book in the series, as well as every one of the various spinoffs. You can find a full list of books on the right, though bear in mind that the official order isn’t always the release order! If you’d rather read in release order, follow the blog posts in the order they were posted, starting with Escape from Blood Castle.
Below, you can find a quick summary about each series, in case you’ve never encountered them before. They’re arranged so that the closest relatives are at the top, and the more distant relatives at the bottom.
The Usborne Puzzle Adventures were the originals, the series all the rest are based on. This series mixed puzzles and narrative, and was intended for children in the middle grades. Includes coverage of the books from the 2023 relaunch!
The Advanced Puzzle Adventures included more complicated plots and often much more complicated puzzles. While they were intended for older kids, there are puzzles in there that would flummox most adults. Are you up to the challenge?
The Science Adventures were a short-lived series of educational books intended for roughly the same audience as the mainline Puzzle Adventures. The series mixed traditional puzzles with educational ones, and tried to gradually teach new concepts as the book went on.
The Young Puzzle Adventures were intended for younger children, sometimes much younger children, depending on the creative team. Either way, they served as an excellent introduction to puzzles in general, to enjoy with mom or dad.
The Puzzle Stories line was released alongside the 2023 revival of the mainline Usborne Puzzle Adventures. Think of them as the next generation of the Young Puzzle Adventures, with punchier and longer stories in a loose, graphic novel format.
The Young Puzzles, sometimes called Puzzle World after the series’ various collections, were the longest-lived series, lasting well into the early 2000s, and republished as the Sticker Puzzles series into the 2010s! The books skew somewhere in between the Young Puzzle Adventures and the mainline books, but have sparse narratives to allow more page space for puzzles, especially Where’s Waldo? / Where’s Wally?-style hidden object hunts.
The Puzzle Journey series was sometimes treated as a part of the Young Puzzles for marketing purposes, but deserves to stand on its own! These edutainment books used the Young Puzzles’ added page space to tell more involved stories, and unlike the Science Adventures, used traditional puzzles to keep kids interested, with educational segments only in between. Was that the right move?
The Solve It Yourself series used photographs of real-world props to tell their stories, and to eventually solve a big, central mystery underlying the entire story. “Solve It Yourself” was also the original name for the Puzzle Adventures, but don’t get the two confused!
The Superpuzzles series doesn’t have much narrative, but they use what they have to connect some of the nastiest puzzles Usborne had to offer, arguably even harder than the Advanced Puzzle Adventures. Ready to really sit down and think?
The Puzzle Adventure Kits are obscure products that blend the line between “book” and “game.” Taking cues from mystery kits, Puzzle Adventure Kits used puzzles at every step to bring you to the finale.
The Whodunnits were Usborne’s short-lived line of mystery books, using the Puzzle Adventures’ familiar combination of prose and comic book-style images to tell a more traditional story. While they lack the puzzles, puzzle fans will still be drawn in by the chance to solve the central mystery, with a cryptic hint system available if you get stuck.
The Spinechillers were Usborne’s line of horror books, which like the Whodunnits used the Puzzle Adventures’ page layout to give kids a scare. While their puzzles are few, they inherited the Whodunnit’s hint system, and between that and general format, deserve to be featured on this blog.
If you’re looking for something that isn’t in this list, consider checking this page about Unrelated and Unobtainable Titles. Or if you wanted to get started at the beginning, click here!
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