News
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2023 Holiday Shipping Dates
Read more →If you are planning to order a Mail Order Mystery as a holiday gift we want to help you time its arrival. There are two ways to have your mystery experience delivered. You can have it packed up all together and shipped in one box, or you can have the mystery sent as separate installments mailed once a week for six weeks. ALL IN ONE BOX All six installments will be packed together in a single shipment that is fully tracked. Every mystery we send out is personalized, so it does take some time from when you place your order to when it...
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Made By Humans #5 - See How We Make Our Pirate Maps
Read more →This is Mail Order Mystery team member Ilknur working at the crafty task of making authentic looking pirate maps for our Treasure Hunt! mystery. We still call this job “baking” because back when Mail Order Mystery first started we soaked the maps in coffee and baked them in the oven at a low temperature to get that faded, weathered look. Since then we have discovered that air drying works just as well as the oven, but nothing works better than coffee. We have tried a lot of ways to do this, but nothing beats the old school coffee soak. And we continue to...
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Avast Matey! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Read more →Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day! This here yearly occasion was dreamed up by a pair of hearties called Ol’ Chumbucket and Cap’n Slappy in 1995, and it be a jolly day for landlubbers and old salts ever since. We have a real affinity for Talk Like a Pirate Day on account of the fact that we love pirate speak, pirate lore, pirate maps and long-lost pirate loot. If you also love pirate speak, pirate lore, pirate maps and long lost pirate loot, Treasure Hunt! Is the mystery for you!Treasure Hunt! be startin’ with a letter from a far off land, a peculiar key and...
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Celebrate Back to School by Enrolling in Spy School 🕵️
Read more →Your kids may be excited about going back to school. Or they may need a bit of convincing. But the one school that everyone loves is spy school! So enroll your kids in our spy academy in Spies, Lies and Serious Bad Guys. They'll get to get to practice their reading and problem solving while having fun at the same time.
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Made By Humans #4 - Marijke Friesen, Meet Our Book Designer
Read more →Meet book designer Marijke Friesen. Marijke designs incredible looking books for publishers. When we decided to make a book for our fairy tale-themed mystery, The Enchanted Slumber, Marijke gamely agreed to help us with the project. We didn’t know how to make a book. We had the story, so that was a good start. We knew we wanted the book to be hard-cover and we really wanted details like gold embossing, a ribbon bookmark and envelopes hidden inside so we could enclose messages sealed with wax. A wonderful artist by the name of Joy Broadbent painted the illustrations for us. And Marijke took...
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Why Our Mystery Left One Customer "Shooketh"
Read more →We absolutely LOVE this Instagram post that we saw this week from one of our customers. It perfectly captures the experience we want kids to have with our mysteries. Don't get us wrong, we're not against screens. Our kids have spent plenty of time building fabulous imaginary worlds in Minecraft, coding and going on online adventures. We're actually pretty sure one of our kids would choose to live inside a game if she could. And that's the problem, a lack of balance. We don't mind seeing our kids on screens, but we also want them to read books, play games...