Last month I flew up to Seattle for 26 hours. With two small children getting away by myself has been tricky but thanks to Mark's flexible schedule I was able to pull of flying up for a friend's birthday party. His genius wife booked us one of the puzzle/escape rooms and I did not want to miss out! Poor Mark didn't get to join but he was great sport and next time he should be able to come too.
Prior to this night, I had only ever heard of escape rooms from the episode of the Big Bang Theory when the zombie tells the group "no refund for escaping early." However, the premise of a bunch of my favorite people put together in a themed room to solve a variety of puzzles had me thinking why didn't I come up with this business? And is there a such thing as a season pass?
After watching an episode of Race to Escape to get in the right mindset, we headed through traffic to Capitol Hill. Our event was at Puzzle Break and although we have no other escape rooms to compare to, we thought the moderators did a fabulous job.
At the briefing we were encouraged to work together, communicate, and have fun. As a group of friends we've been together for nearly 15 years and most of us learned to work together in student leadership long before we had things like careers and kids. Needless to say we felt confident that teamwork wasn't going to be our downfall. The moderator's spiel was hilarious yet informative and set us all in the mood to feel clever.
The room itself was brilliantly yet simply themed and we immediately got to work. Once the door shut we had 60 minutes to solve enough puzzles to find the key to escape. There were more than enough challenging puzzles and objects to work with for our group of 12 and we all had something in the room that needed a different type of brain to solve. It was fast paced but did not feel stressful. A few times the moderators gave us some simple hints such as "you have all the information you need" or "there is nothing else in that box" but they later told us that relative to most groups we had very little moderator help.
We escaped the room in 56:32 and felt extremely proud of ourselves. Apparently less than 14% of the groups escape so that statistic only added to our collective ego. It was a dream to work so seamlessly with friends who are used to getting shit done. We all agreed that it would have been much harder and less fun to work with strangers. And while it definitely would make an awesome team building experience, having a wide variety of professions and fields of study between us was certainly one thing that made our group especially strong.
We're already dreaming of our next escape room and considering some of the other companies out there as well as returning to Puzzle Break. Have you ever done an escape room? Did you love it as much as I did?
