Escape Rooms!

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jelly
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Escape Rooms!

Post by jelly »

Hey guyss, I'm opening an Escape Room facility in my small Canadian city. \:D/ For those of you who maybe be curious, we've launched our website and teaser video the other day.

Now we have a rough idea of what we're doing, but there's still room for lots of little puzzles to be figured out and designed. (We're opening next month, just waiting for city permits.) So I wanna know from those of you who have done an escape room before, what's been your favorite part? Favorite puzzle? What's been your LEAST favorite part?
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Post by Old Brad »

Dude, this is awesome! Sadly I've never done a live escape room, just the online ones. Would love to do a live one sometime.
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Post by GJ »

Ah! How rad jelly! I've only ever tried one, though I did enjoy the challenge immensely.

My favourite part was solving a maze with magnets, I was the one using pressure to move the piece around, and my coherts on the opposite side of the wall were giving directions.
Another puzzle we liked was one that required us to listen closely for clues speakers gave from various sections of the room.

I think my least favourite part was when we were attempting to open a safe and found it difficult to narrow down our amount of information.

Anyways, hope it all goes well with yours. :)
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Post by Catspaw »

That's really cool, Jelly! :D Have fun! I'm sure you will do an amazing job. The video looks great, and I love how it looks like there will be a historical aspect to it.

I've only done work-related versions where somebody has created clues and we were just in a regular room, but it's not a real escape room. For one clue we used a directional lock, which was really neat. I had never seen one before, so just that felt like more of a challenge than a standard combination lock. We solved a math puzzle that gave us arrows pointing different ways, and then had to put them into the directional lock to open a box with our next clue.
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Post by Old Brad »

One question, do random online acquaintances get in free? ;)
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Post by Paula »

How much will you guys be charging? I don't live in Canada, but I'm just curious, because the prices of some of these Escape Rooms are soooooooooo ridiculous like thirty bucks per person for one hour!
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Post by bookworm »

I've never done an escape room and don't really have a desire to (the time limit turns me off), but I enjoy watching videos of other people doing them occasionally. From that vicarious experience my primary advice would be to double check everything you put in the room from the mindset of the patron going in blind to make sure there aren't unintentional distractions, knowing that they will be overly paranoid in looking for hints or clues and will think everything they find is a part of the puzzle. I saw one video where there was some writing underneath a table that one of the people noticed and they thought it was the next clue, but in reality it was just a random mark from the manufacturer, but they used a ton of time trying to figure out what it meant and that cost them victory. I would be furious if that happened to me.
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Post by jelly »

GJ wrote:My favourite part was solving a maze with magnets, I was the one using pressure to move the piece around, and my coherts on the opposite side of the wall were giving directions.
Ahh, I love that! I'm going to definitely make sure we have a few puzzles that involve people needing to be on both sides of a wall, because those are my favorite too!
Catspaw wrote:That's really cool, Jelly! :D Have fun! I'm sure you will do an amazing job. The video looks great, and I love how it looks like there will be a historical aspect to it.
Yes, thank you!! Pulling from actual historical figures and situations was a big part of why I wanted to do this. I love history and stuff.
Brad wrote:One question, do random online acquaintances get in free? ;)
Yes. If you're ever in Saskatchewan, Canada, hit me up. ;)
Paula wrote:How much will you guys be charging? I don't live in Canada, but I'm just curious, because the prices of some of these Escape Rooms are soooooooooo ridiculous like thirty bucks per person for one hour!
Everyone in our area is charging roughly $25 a person, so that's what we'll be doing, and from a business end of things it would be hard to charge much less than that and make any money. :anxious: I certainly agree that it gets expensive... I watch my bank account shrink everywhere I travel somewhere new, haha.
bookworm wrote:From that vicarious experience my primary advice would be to double check everything you put in the room from the mindset of the patron going in blind to make sure there aren't unintentional distractions, knowing that they will be overly paranoid in looking for hints or clues and will think everything they find is a part of the puzzle. I saw one video where there was some writing underneath a table that one of the people noticed and they thought it was the next clue, but in reality it was just a random mark from the manufacturer, but they used a ton of time trying to figure out what it meant and that cost them victory. I would be furious if that happened to me.
Yup. Some escape room designers actually put in red herrings on purpose, and I think that's an awful idea.
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Post by bookworm »

jelly wrote:Some escape room designers actually put in red herrings on purpose, and I think that's an awful idea.
Yeah I don't like that idea either, but at least those are intentional (I guess you're supposed to be able to figure out before wasting too much time that it's a fake clue?), but this incident was an oversight by the room designers that appeared to be a legitimate clue enough that they kept working on it. Not cool at all.
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Post by Old Brad »

jelly wrote:
Brad wrote:One question, do random online acquaintances get in free? ;)
Yes. If you're ever in Saskatchewan, Canada, hit me up. ;)
Darn, why couldn't you live in Ontario, or somewhere closer than a 26 hour drive from me? ;)
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Post by bookworm »

I've done one now; we went for a friend's birthday last week. We won. :)
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Post by Catspaw »

That's awesome, bookworm! Way to go! :D

My sister and her husband recently did their first escape room, but they went with friends who had gone lots of times before, so they felt like that really helped them. Now that I've gone once and have a better idea of what to do, I'd like to go again one day.
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Post by ~JCGJ~ »

I made a mini escape room for my little brother's birthday party, that can generally be solved in about 10 minutes. I realize I'm rather late in my reply. :mrgreen:
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Post by Catspaw »

That's so fun! What a great idea. :D Was it a lot of work? Did you come up with everything yourself, or get ideas online?
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Post by Kathy0 »

jelly wrote:
Brad wrote:One question, do random online acquaintances get in free? ;)
Yes. If you're ever in Saskatchewan, Canada, hit me up. ;)

Oooooooohhh, I am there for hunting some. I might randomly show up. *laughs evilly* ;) Or maybe not. Haha!

I am actually very interested in escape rooms. I have only done one at my school one time but id like took into doing a real one.
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Post by MonkeyDude »

The only time I did an escape room we had waaaaay too many people, and once the clock started everyone started over-turning furniture to find clues and it got really confusing cause we found them out of order.
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Post by bookworm »

MonkeyDude wrote:it got really confusing cause we found [clues] out of order.
That always happens; how can you find hidden things in an order? The puzzle is finding all the various clues and determining which are for what task.
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Post by Catspaw »

The one time I went with friends, matching the clues to the correct puzzles was definitely one of our issues! We wasted a lot of time trying to make one thing work when it was for a totally different clue! :mad:
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Post by ~JCGJ~ »

MonkeyDude wrote:The only time I did an escape room we had waaaaay too many people, and once the clock started everyone started over-turning furniture to find clues and it got really confusing cause we found them out of order.
A well-designed escape room would hide the clues in such a way so that it's not possible to find the clues/solve the puzzles out of order... :shame:
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Post by shnoodlec »

Whaaaaat? :noway: The whole fun is piecing them together.
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