We Must Escape!

In honor of V-Day, friends, I’m going to tell you about what we did for V-Day. I surprised my husband with a trip to a local escape room.

Do you guys have these where you live? In case you don’t, these are places that offer a number of rooms (and they are literal rooms) filled with clues and puzzles. You have one hour to solve all the puzzles and escape! (A lot of them are literally that–figure out how to get out of the room–but some have a goal you have to achieve before escaping, such as solving a mystery.)

We quite a few around here, and they’ve been on my radar for a while, but we haven’t managed to get to one before. But Friday we had a free night, so I booked us a room at a new one close by because they wouldn’t smoosh us in with random people (some places will stick small groups with other small groups, and that did not sound like a good date).

The end goal for our room was to steal the diamond before the detectives arrived. Our gamemaster was very sweet, giving us a rundown on how the whole process worked since we’d never done one before. She warned us that it might be a little hard for just two people, especially first-timers, and let us know how to ask for a clue if we needed one. And then she locked our phones away and let us into the room.

It was lovely from the get-go. The room was nicely atmospheric of an early 20th century bank office/vault. We took a moment to examine the room (the husband went through all the books on the bookcase–just in case–and I went through all the drawers) before getting to work. We had a bit of a snafu at the very beginning–the code we put into a briefcase didn’t work, even though it should have. So we spent some time wrestling with it, and just when the gamemaster came in to help, it finally opened.

And from there it was smooth sailing.

We escaped with our diamond in 34 minutes.

Oh man, the look on our gamemaster’s face was glorious. She said she’d never seen two people sail through so many puzzles so quickly.

It actually was a perfect date, because it reminded me how complementary my husband and my skills are. A puzzle that probably would have taken me all hour to figure out he looked at and knew how to work it immediately (though my searching skills did find us the inputs for it). My skills of observation led us to know exactly where to put a couple of different puzzle pieces when they showed up while my husband stared at them in confusion.

And now we’re hooked. It was so fun. This place is new (I think we hold the room record, but it’s only been open two weeks, so…*shrug*) and has another, harder room opening soon that we shall definitely try out at the first opportunity. But going to the physical rooms does require us to have a free evening, and they’re not cheap, so we’ve branched out. They sell escape room games at our local gameporium, so we picked one of those up to play at home, and we’ve subscribed to a service that sends a new escape game in a box every two months.

Have you ever done something like this, friends? Recommendations?

 

One Comment:

  1. We have those near where I live, and I’ve been curious to see what it’s like. Definitely going to see if hubby and I can do it sometime soon.

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