At ExitTheRoom our Games Masters are kept busy thanks to the popularity of our escape room games, both in real settings and being played virtually. One question that often comes up is how difficult is it to monitor the games and keep up with the teams and their queries as they try to escape? It's often the case that in the excitement of the gameplay, the teams can forget everything as their minds go completely blank under the stress. Today we thought we’d take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the more crazy things that happen inside escape rooms. We should point out that some of these stories are from our own experiences and others come from the escape room subreddit.
People Who Simply Give Up
You might be surprised how many people enjoy the escape room experience to such a degree that are not so concerned about actually escaping. Though they may come into the game with a determination to beat the clock, towards the end they find themselves enjoying the puzzles and riddles to such an extent that they are happy to simply stay and play. For them, it's about having a good time in the room.
One reddit user, “frizzy kid”, tells us a story of how their team’s attempts at escaping were not going so well. But rather than get upset about this they decided to enjoy themselves. In the room they were playing, there was a piano as a prop. It turned out that one member of a team was an excellent pianist and so started playing songs. And within a very short period of time everyone in the group was singing. The whole escape room experience was forgotten and yet everyone had a wonderful time.
People Who Will Do Anything To Escape
As Games Masters, we've all come across the type of player who is absolutely determined to complete the game and emerge victorious no matter what. They don't care what it takes, even if it means skipping steps. Just as long as they're not stuck in the room once the time is completed. The problem with this approach is that, when a player steps into the room, they are normally faced with puzzles and clues that they have never come across before. In other words, it's a whole new world for them, and everything in the room has the potential to be an important piece of the whole puzzle. With the type of player who is solely focused on winning, they can often fail to see the wood for the trees. For example, there can be a container at the entrance into which the players can deposit their bags and coats whilst playing. Sometimes we see players going through these things without realising they are their own items. Duh!
A reddit user called “sunny person” told us a story of when their friends went to play in an escape room game. The funny thing was that their friends were all locksmiths. So they decided to skip all the clues and puzzles and concentrate on cracking all the locks, one by one. They completed the game in no time at all. But we feel they missed the whole point of the escape room, which is to use those little grey cells to find clues and solve them.
As the clock ticks down, and there are only a few minutes left, it‘s interesting to see how different teams make a last ditch effort to break out. As Games Masters we see this behaviour all the time. One reddit user called “moonpie-chunky” explains that when his team realised that the time was almost up they just started smashing buttons flipping switches pulling levers in the crazy hope that something would work and they would win.
Creative People Solving Problems
When clues and puzzles are being designed by the escape room team, we ourselves often get caught up in a single way by which they may be solved. yet every once in awhile, a team player will come in and in a super creative manner, will solve the clue in a way we just couldn't have imagined. After seeing hundreds of people tackle a clue in a similar manner, it’s certainly memorable when a creative player achieves the same result but from using a completely different approach.
The reddit user “yeah_cheeseburgers” remembers that once his team was faced with two locked drawers, with one being on top of the other. At first they tried to undo each lock. But then one big-brained member of the team unlocked the top drawer, removed the drawer completely, which then allowed complete access to the one below without having to tackle its lock. This made absolute common sense. Interestingly enough, the escape room Games Master had never seen this problem tackled in such a creative manner.
Probably one of the craziest creative stories, that involves both creativity and luck, is told by the reddit user “hokeytown30.” He remembers that they needed to find the word “Waterloo” using a series of clues and also a dictionary. This would give them the date of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 which was an important number solution. The problem was that they couldn't find the word Waterloo, but somehow made the word “eaterloi” from the letters available. They naturally assumed this was an anagram and and managed to make the word “aerolite” from it. The crazy part of the story is that they looked up this word in the dictionary and saw it was invented in 1815. And that was the same number needed to undo the lock!.
