We had talked about trying an Escape Room for a couple years; my work department finally got together for an outing recently. We split into two teams and did two escape rooms each at Mastermind in Schaumburg. Our organizer picked the two easiest scenarios – Sorcerer’s Secret (35% escape rate) and Lost in Time (42%).
I’ll be honest, I had no idea there were that many different kinds of combination locks available. In addition to the standard locker combination lock (3 times to the right to the number, 2 times to the left to the number, and right to the last number), there were luggage-style locks with anywhere from 3 to 5 numbers or letters needed, including some that had both letters and numbers on them, and what I can only describe as DDR locks – the options were up, down, left, and right.
Mind you, the locks weren’t the puzzles. The puzzles gave you the answer to the locks, assuming you could figure out which one to use where. There were also a few physical puzzles that required team work, like a maze where the person with the magnet couldn’t see the maze and had to be talked through it. And that’s about all the details I can give without spoiling things… I will say that there’s an Easter egg in the Lost in Time puzzle for Doctor Who fans.
I will also say that LARP experience helped, if only because of the number of puzzles involved in those games, particularly at the Whately LARPs. If you get stuck, you have clues available that you can spend points on, with a finite number of points (100) before it counts as a loss.
Both teams escaped from both puzzles… I guess that’s what happens when you put IT problem solvers in a room.