Help me make an Escape the Room Puzzle

The Game Room
1

Or, rather, Escape the Campsite

My best friend is getting married in a few months, and I’m planning his bachelor party. He wants a camping trip weekend, so we’re doing that. He also loves Escape the Room puzzles, so I thought: why don’t I put together some puzzles and have the rest of the groomsmen solve them.

So, anyone want to help me think up some puzzles and plan the logistics?

The constraints are:

  1. Cheap - This isn’t a professional room, and while I expect to buy a few combo locks, I’m not dropping more than, say, $30 on it.
  2. Portable. It’s got to all fit in the trunk along with all the rest of our camping gear.
  3. Camping-themed-ish.

My thoughts so far are that I can have one tent with a lock on it, and within the tent, some clues hidden among my bag (possibly with more locked cases).

I can also hide the key to my car somewhere, and have the car be a locked box (that you can see into).

I expect to have a smartphone that can have a passcode to access, and clues within.

I expect to have a Kindle that could be used for a sort of the “bookshelf” puzzle. Something about the books on it could be clues.

I have one of those little wooden cube puzzles that can be carefully disassembled if you know how. I can write a clue on the inner pieces.

2

how much prep time away from the other campers will you have? I.E., does it all have to pop out of the box ready to solve, or can you take 30 minutes to bury something or hide it in a tree?

If you have the time, it might be nice to bring some science into it, like hiding a clue in the nook of a nearby state tree, or the only decidious tree nearby, or under an igneous rock, or whatever. This is somewhat dependent on the campsite helping out though.

Inside a tent is good, but taped to the underside of a tent is better :slight_smile:

If you’re not under a fire ban, it might be cool to do something with heat - like invisible ink that you need to warm up to see the message, or hide some nails in a log that they need to burn the log to get the clue (like… you cut the tips off 3 of the 8 nails, and that’s meaningful)

3

I was watching a video of something like this just yesterday, with some Liverpool FC players solving puzzles to escape a room. Might give you some ideas…

4

I can make them all leave for a bit to set it up. I’ll have to if I’m going to actually hide anything.

I like this, although I won’t see the campsite until we’re there, so I can’t rely on it having any more than what campsites always have: a picnic table and a fire pit.

Perfect.

Currently, there’s no fire ban. Invisible ink is a good idea, and could be done with just a match anyway.

5

Make sure you have a giant clue that you need all the pieces to in order to solve, but you get those pieces little by little.

I did a room one time where we kept getting markers (the art kind), like a shit ton of them. Kept going and going. We eventually needed to combine them into one giant pole and hit a button that was way out of reach.

It doesn’t have to be that complicated. But giving pieces of a puzzle.

Oh I just got it.

Find out the latitude and longitude of where you want everyone to meet (or the final box or whatever) and break up the numbers into little bits and pieces. Once they have all the numbers signify some way of putting them in order (a dot of color, by alphabet something like that) and then once they’re all together the players can go to that place

6

I like this idea, but unless I can get a very accurate map of the campgrounds, I don’t know that I can pull it off.

I guess I can have one clue that I make ad-hoc the day of that does the necessary offset, but I think I’d prefer to have this totally finished beforehand (aside from the hiding of things) since I’m also organizing the logistics of the trip, and I’m sure there will be random nonsense to deal with there.

Great advice about having clues combine to form one big thing, though.

7

No trees? I was thinking pick 3-4 clues that fit the most common 3-4 trees in the area, so you’re almost guaranteed to have 1-2 of those available nearby.

Or you could check google maps and see what’s nearby.

But I understand concern about relying on something you aren’t sure is there.

8

I’m sure there will be trees. But I was responding to using the lat/long as the big clue, which is tricky without surveying the campground first, or having to rework things on the fly.

9

This all sounds like so much fun. And I thought bachelor parties only involved drinking and strippers.

10

My experience has been those are the minority.

ETA: Well, not the drinking part. But most I’ve been to haven’t involved strippers at all, and the ones that did involve strippers was usually after the main party for those who wanted to go to a club.

11

I’ve been to bachelor parties that involved strippers and those that didn’t. In this case, the groom has decided he doesn’t want strippers. I’m sure there will be plenty of drinking.

12

If a little bit of alcohol is involved, the puzzles will seem a lot harder.

I don’t know is this helps with the book, but on a scavenger hunt I did with my religious school kids, they had to find envelops with numbers, after an earlier clue had led them to a book, then they looked at pages in the book, and there was a word with a little sticker pointing to it (I couldn’t circle it, it wasn’t my book), and the words made a sentence that was their last clue.

13

You don’t necessarily have to just use combination locks. If you have an old padlock with a key, you can use a “string puzzle”, such as the one shown here: http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/stringring7.jpg. You would put the key on the string instead of the washers. Of course, the puzzle itself would have to be mounted to something, so you can’t just take the puzzle over to the box. In fact, the puzzle could be mounted to the backside of the box so that the box can only be opened by removing the key.

14

Here’s the post-mortem analysis, for people curious how it went.

I had three key locks (tent, box inside tent, car), and two combination locks (backpack inside tent, box inside car). Finally, the last thing to unlock was an android tablet with a 4-digit unlock code.

The groom and I both play Magic, so I knew I wanted one of the puzzles to be a Magic puzzle. I ended up hiding Magic cards in a variety of places, including in some of the locked locations. Eight in total. Along with a play mat that indicated where they were and that the amount of damage was the solution to the puzzle. I ended up making the puzzle more complicated than I intended since I missed one interaction, but didn’t realize until the day before when it was too late to change.

Two hidden keys (to the car and the tent) were in fairly obvious places (one taped under the picnic table, the other taped to a Magic card), and were found quickly. I wanted to broaden the scope of the search quickly, and that worked well.

The other key was buried, and there were 5 numbered instructions indicating the starting point, and how far to go in various directions. There was also a measuring tape and a compass hidden in various places. Most of the distances were in Smoots, with one in feet, so they had to find the conversion factor (which was written at the bottom of the list of instructions I read to them). I had intended to make this one actually go somewhere, but when I tried to reproduce my instructions, there was too much error following the compass/measuring tape, so I just led them in a circle back to the starting point. Kind of lame, but they also tried digging in several places before figuring out that they didn’t actually go anywhere. One of the instructions was inside a little wooden puzzle that had to be disassembled. The puzzle was in a box labeled “Look! A Clue!” that was inside the car in full view. Tearing off the “Look! A Clue” label revealed a Magic card.

On the picnic table were game pieces from a variety of games (Monopoly, Settlers of Cataan, Magic, etc.). All red herrings except for the Magic card. Also, a crossword. I made some masks out of construction paper in various shapes and left them around. Some were red herrings, but four of them combined to go over the crossword and show only certain clue numbers and certain squares (that spelled out the combination in words). So, they only had to solve a subset of the crossword.

I printed up quotes about puzzles and hidden things and secrets from a variety of literary sources and placed them in various places around the campsite. One of them was from the Bible, and in the tent I had a kindle with the Bible on it that could be searched for the quote. The chapter and verse was another combination.

All in all, it went really well, and they had a lot of fun with it. They didn’t quite get there in an hour, but finished only a few minutes past. I did give a few hints along the way when they seemed to be stuck.