WE FINALLY DID AN ESCAPE ROOM!!!

For my boyfriend’s birthday two weeks ago, we finally got a group together to do an escape room. If you’ve never done one and enjoy solving puzzles, then you’ll absolutely love it!

Essentially, it’s like a real life game of “Clue”. You’re trapped in a room and have to find clues that then lead to more clues that lead to a puzzle of some sort that you must solve to unlock a briefcase, drawer, etc. You have an hour to put the pieces together and escape.

Now, I don’t want to brag here, BUT WE MADE IT OUT WITH 3 MINUTES TO SPARE!

If you can find a place that puts these on in your home town, I guarantee you won’t regret going. The company we used had 5 different themed rooms all with a different difficulty/ escape rating. We chose to do the second hardest one (with only a 24% escape rate) for our first time. And now that we’ve conquered that, we are so eager to go back for the harder one (with a 9% escape rate).  Our’s was a cool 1920’s themed room of a “mobster” boss who’s been caught and has the room rigged to blow.

You’ll solve clues together all while you hear the clock tick-tock away.

Here are my tips for how to #win at an Escape Room:

• Work together but separately: What I mean by this, is have a 2-3 people work on one thing while others work on another. You want to avoid all 10 people working on a single puzzle at a time and also want to make sure that once a puzzle is solved, the group knows about it to ensure that other people don’t re-do something that’s already been solved.
• Talk: Anytime you see something you think is connected to the story or different, verbalize it. Maybe something you say helps someone else see/solve something. You literally cannot get through an escape room successfully unless everyone talks. 
• Use the hints if you need: Our escape room allowed three hints that we could ask a monitor and the hint would then be given. We only did so once a puzzle had been through all the people in the group and still hadn’t been solved. Don’t waste hints on something that only one person tried to solve.
• Use the story/theme: You have to be totally into the story of the room. Otherwise you may not catch something important, like a love letter on a desk coordinating to paintings on the wall.
• Write things down: Our room gave us one sheet of paper to write down anything we thought important to remember. We used the sheet to write down combinations of numbers we found/used to unlock a briefcase. This made sure we didn’t waste time trying numbers we’d already used.

I hope you get the chance to get some friends together and try an Escape Room!

xoxo,

Amanda

IG/TW: @amandac_smith