Oh man, my Santa could NOT have nailed my present better! I talked about my love for puzzles and escape-the-room type games in my profile, and what shows up in the mail today but an honest to goodness treasure map complete with coded documents and a request for assistance from the highly esteemed "Kattering Institute"! Straight outta 1908, according to the date on the letter. ;) I wish I could show a picture of the envelope everything came in. It's this gorgeous metallic blue color and hand-lettered in gold calligraphy...definitely saving it. Everything is super high quality too; the map feels like actual linen, and the pages are all heavy parchmenty feeling cardstock. I rubbed a finger along the edge of one of the pages and it marked me--they actually hand-burned the edges of the pages! SO cool!

I adore stuff like this. The funny thing is, my friend and I actually already subscribe to several other similar types of mail-order mystery/puzzles, but we've never heard of this one! As soon as I showed her this one, she decided to order it for herself and solve it on her own :D

Well, I'm gonna go dig in and find out just what happened to "the VALORE, a merchant vessel lost centuries ago at sea." THANK YOU, SANTA!!!!