Have You Ever Done An Escape Room? Was It Worth It?

The Game Room
1

I’ve been thinking about giving the one in St. Louis a try if and when I ever have some money and time. I love puzzles and cheesy games, so why not?

Have you ever done one of these things? Was it worth the time and money?

2

We’ve done three now.

Depends on the room. Some are extremely well done, and have difficult but fair clues, and the best we did absolutely required teamwork.

Some have clues that, really, even Sherlock Holmes could not be counted upon to figure out, or lack a necessity for teamwork, or some element of the game might not even work.

In general we really enjoy them but you should check reviews and pick and choose your winners.

3

Heeeeelllll Yeah I do them!

I love them to death. Done, probably, 10 or 15 at this point. Can’t remember all the wins, but my loss record is only 2.

They’re the best. Word of advice, try to find different thinkers. Get the math guy, with the puzzle guy, with the wordsmith etc. A well-rounded team will outperform a smart one.

4

We (me, my wife, and 13 and 14 year olds) did the “Museum Heist” at Breakout. We were able to finish it with about 4 minutes left in the hour. We had a lot of fun and are planning to go back to try their other rooms.

The Museum Heist requires collaboration and people with different skills. I’m the word game master in our house so I solved a lot of those puzzles, including one that the game master said very few teams were able to solve without a hint. He actually said “Wow” over the intercom when he saw how fast I solved it. The kids remembered every detail of things they had seen, which came in handy several times. My wife is good at organization so she helped figure out what order puzzles had to be solved. The puzzles have to be completed in order and there’s no point wasting time on a puzzle if you don’t have all of the clues yet. One puzzle required physical collaboration between team members, which was a fun addition. Most of the puzzles could be solved by a person working alone but this puzzle required at least two team members to work on something which would be very difficult for one person to do alone.

We did have to get two hints from the game master but they were very small hints. Just enough to direct our attention to something we weren’t seeing. I felt like that was cheating but I’m hyper-competitive. Without those hints we might have been stuck at the beginning forever and we wouldn’t have had any fun.

5

Here are some recent threads

I’ve done one pure escape room that I enjoyed, and I’ve been to Boda Borg twice which I found to be even more in line with my tastes.

6

My last job we did one in NYC as a team building event. It was fun. Although some of my team mates got annoyed because it was a timed spy-theme room and I didn’t want to leave until the timer said 00:07.:smiley:

7

I’ve done two. One out in Dayton, OH that was based on the Daniel Craig Casino Royale movie. It was pretty fun. There was three of us plus four from another group. We made it with just under 1 minute left. One of the problems was that apparently solving one of the puzzles caused a door to unlock, but the click was way too quiet for us to hear. The game masters basically threw us a bone on that one since we had no clue we had accomplished that part of the puzzle.

And then there was this that a bunch of us from work (and our +1’s) did: Best Musical Theater Colleges in USA

It was fully cooperative and required pretty much everyone to help in order to beat it. It was a good mix of theater and puzzle room. (I also graduated college with the guy who made the puzzles. I had a few classes with him, actually.) That one was really fun.

8

Invited a bunch of random friends to come with me to one for my birthday in April.

Cheesy, clever, fun as heck! I didn’t solve a damn thing but I had a great time watching my friends work on it!

The whole place seemed shoddy and run down but I was very impressed with some of the stuff they managed to do with what looked like a small budget, like electromagnets, lasers and a hidden room.

9

I did one where you are in a room with a chained-up “zombie” (actor in makeup) and he’s trying to “bite” you (tag you) throughout the event. At regular intervals an alarm goes off and his chain gets a little more slack. When you run out of time his chain is released and he will “bite” everyone. When “bitten” you “die” which means you can no longer participate.

It was a big challenge because not only did you have to find clues and solve puzzles while time ticked by you also had to watch where you were and where the zombie was. Sometimes you had to get to a part of the room he could reach. So you did things like trick him into tangling his chain, or get someone to distract him, or just move really quickly.

It was a rush. I’m not as young as I used to be and I haven’t stayed in the best shape but apparently when properly motivated I’m pretty darn nimble. Surprisingly nobody got “bit” until the end. We found the key to escape as time expired and the zombie got loose. One of my friends ran interference and got “bit” as we unlocked the door and escaped. It was crazy fun.

10

I’ve done one. It was a pretty good one with mostly fair puzzles. Mostly. Two things seriously irked me.

  1. The padlocks and other physical objects would be a little worn, and a little unreliable, such that you could have the correct combination and they wouldn’t work.

  2. There was a tremendous amount of “meta” knowledge about escape rooms you needed to have a reasonable chance of success. From knowing that a wall and a list of nonsense words means a word bank search (apparently standard), to knowing to split your team up, to knowing to leave team members on each unsolved section of the room, to knowing to stack used puzzle pieces so you can focus on the unsolved section, to knowing that random junk items are going to be important. To knowing that the clue is not going to be hidden under a random junk item. To knowing that the room is going to be in 2 parts, and so there’s a door to another section.

11

I’ve done maybe 10. We’ve done ones topics from getting Santa unstuck from the chimney to getting your time machine to bring you back from the 80s.

Most have simply been finding the combination or keys for locks, but one was more difficult with a code and going back to papers we had found and using them to get the final combination.

The most important part is usually communicating. Let everyone know when you find something or you’ll spend 5 minutes looking for a key that you already have.

12

We did one, and it was really fun even though in the end, the clues were not fair (seriously, the puzzle needs to be sort of solvable).

13

I’ve done a few, and I designed (a very low-production-value) one for a group of friends to play on a camping trip. I think they are really fun, although some are obviously better than others.