Escape Room Wrap-Up!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial)

As promised, some notes on an escape room, in no particular order:

• Although we went with six people per run of the room, it felt like the optimal count was probably five.
• Every team escaped, though a couple only managed it by the skin of their teeth. And I think that’s good! I’m a big fan of making a room in a way that experts may solve in 30 minutes flat, but gives enough breathing room that everybody gets to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end.
• Polystyrene is your friend if you ever need to put up fake walls in a hurry.
• (you will need a good hoover to pick up all the polystyrene bits)
• Having a visual map of the path through the room, with lock details on it, will save you many many times over.
• I think I’d like to see a tiny bit more non-linearity in our next room design ¹. Not a huge amount, but maybe at least one extra parallel pathway.
• Having the clues for the murder mystery double up as the ‘tokens’ that the players had to find made things confusing. I did have the idea of printing out tokens to supplement the clues, but it was too cold to print on the resin printer out in the garage.
• Having a bunch of extra puzzles available allowed us to adjust the room a touch after the first two run-throughs — over-preparation was helpful!
• The speakeasy reveal through the fake fireplace was great. For people that didn’t know the bar existed, it was a magical moment (and in fact, one person even forgot the bar even existed until they got through the fireplace!). Even for those that knew there was a room concealed behind the fireplace, the secondary part of me being behind the bar (having been locked away for over an hour!) still took them by surprise a little. Hurrah!
• It went against all that we believe to be proper and true, but keeping the dinner menu down to something straight-forward, relatively easy to put together, and taking advantage of jarred sauces and the like…really made things less stressful - and the food was still really good!
• Cooking the chicken cuts via sous-vide was a little fancier, I guess, but it also helped us because we could just dunk them in the water bath and know they’d be ready whenever we needed them.
• I felt bad about not doing the special chocolates I had planned…but it would have been a bit of a nightmare to do them every weekend and there was a big couch in front of the chocolate work surfaces.
• The clues suffered a little from being written in one frantic afternoon session, and some tinkering took place as the weeks went on to make things a little easier.
• Role-playing varies amongst the teams, but people did seem to enjoy throwing accusations around, and the fake cigarettes were a rather worrying hit with many.
• One player even went as far to invent a traitor mechanic in order to throw people off the scent that their character was the murderer. We deliberately didn’t do this because we wanted people to complete the room, instead attaching ending conditions to clues and whatnot, but it was interesting to see it emerge organically as one team was playing.

All credit to Tammy for coming up with this outlandish idea and making it an amazing reality.

The blog is going to go on a little hiatus for the next week or so — I’m only taking my iPad with me to Las Vegas, and I still haven’t migrated my Hugo-based workflow for this blog off my laptop. But hopefully back the weekend of the 22nd.