Pandora's Legacy

TED-Ed + PostCurious

Age: Recommended 14+

Players: 1-4

Play Time: 720 minutes

Awards: 2025 Golden Lock Award

We love jigsaw puzzles — we have a few 1000+ piece puzzles hanging all around the house — and we also really enjoy table-top escape games, so when I saw Pandora's Legacy on Kickstarter over a year ago, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon.

I received the game before the end of 2025 and played it with the kids as a team of 3 during the school holidays. Did it live up to expectations?

• We had a fantastic time with Pandora's Legacy! It was the ultimate fusion of jigsaw and escape puzzles that maximised the utility of both formats, pushing the boundaries of what tabletop experience can be.

• The puzzle itself is 1,200 pieces, but don't worry, you don't need to do it all at once (more on this below). The artwork is absolutely gorgeous and meticulously detailed. And it had to be, because many of the secrets are hidden within the drawings, requiring a very astute eye and careful observations to progress through the game. So in some ways, this was also partly a "Where's Wally/Waldo?" kind of game.

• The game has many clearly labelled boxes and envelopes stacked inside, containing not just puzzle pieces but other props and mini bits and pieces I won't spoil. The aim is to work through the boxes and envelopes alphabetically, piecing different sections of the puzzle together while solving puzzles along the way.

• I appreciated the level of difficulty, which was high but (mostly) not frustrating. We love a good challenge, and we were impressed by how clever some of the puzzles were and how they were blended into the puzzle. There were probably only a couple of puzzles that felt slightly finicky or were a bit of a stretch to solve.

• Internet connectivity is important for this game for guidance and hints, but I did not feel like there was an over-reliance on it. It has apparently been updated for mobile optimisation since we played it.

• I liked that there was a genuine attempt to connect the game to the story and the Greek mythology theme, though those lengthy names did indeed lead to a bit of a struggle reading them out at times!

• Incredibly, we somehow lost a piece of the puzzle (or maybe it was never included, as we have not found it since), which we initially thought was intentional and were horrified to discover at the very end that it wasn't. However, to the credit of Allplay, the company that arranged the shipment, all I had to do was submit a form and I received an entire pack of puzzle pieces to replace the missing piece.

Rank: A